Susanna and the Elders

In 1617 Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, then archbishop of Bologna, ordered a group of large canvases from a painter in his twenties who was still working out of the small town of Cento. This was one of them. The story comes from the Book of Daniel. Two elders who serve as judges spy on a married woman bathing in her own garden, then threaten to accuse her of adultery unless she gives in to them. She refuses, they accuse her anyway, and she is sentenced to death before Daniel cross-examines the two men separately and catches them contradicting each other. Painters had generally treated this as a chance to paint a nude. Guercino picks the seconds before the elders speak. One of them leans in over the hedge, fixed on her. The other, the white-bearded one, turns away from her and looks straight out of the picture, raising a hand to keep whoever is standing there quiet. The Prado's own reading of that gesture is blunt: he is telling us not to give the two of them away. The picture hung in the Ludovisi collection in Rome until 1664, when Philip IV bought it.