Susanna and the Elders

Writing in 1742, the Neapolitan biographer Bernardo de Dominici described a Susanna hanging in the house of Luigi Romeo, baron of San Luigi, in Naples, beside a Bathsheba that is now in Columbus, Ohio. This canvas is the same size as that one and almost certainly the picture he saw. It was painted in Naples, most likely between 1637 and 1641.

How many hands are in it has never been settled. The reading most often given assigns the landscape and the architecture to Domenico Gargiulo, working from a design by Viviano Codazzi, the figure of Susanna to Artemisia Gentileschi, and the two men leaning over the balustrade to the young Bernardo Cavallino. The 2001 Gentileschi exhibition catalogue went further and reproduced the whole painting as the work of a follower of Cavallino. Sotheby's sold it in 2022 as an Artemisia, for a little over two million dollars, to a buyer who was not named.

The story is from the Book of Daniel. Two elders of the community, both of them judges, corner Susanna in her own garden and tell her that if she refuses them they will swear they caught her with a young man. She refuses, they accuse her, and she is condemned until Daniel questions the two separately and catches them contradicting each other. The men here are not old, and one of them has raised a finger to his lips.