Susanna and the Elders

When this was painted in Venice in the early 1600s, the fashionable thing in Rome was Caravaggio's harsh, shadowed realism. Padovanino went the other way. He had travelled to Rome to copy Titian's great Bacchanals, and he spent his career reviving the warm, golden Venetian manner a full generation after it had faded. The subject suited that ambition. It comes from the Book of Daniel: Susanna, a married woman bathing in her garden, is cornered by two elders, respected judges, who threaten to accuse her of adultery unless she yields. She refuses. A nude in a garden was exactly the kind of thing Titian had made his own, and Padovanino paints it in that inherited light. The canvas hangs in Bucharest today because it entered the royal collection of Romania's first king, Carol I, and it was cleaned and restored there in 2011.