Susannah and the Elders

The Prado will not give this canvas a single year. It dates it between 1552 and 1555, and it says plainly why. There is nothing like these paintings anywhere else in Tintoretto's work, so there is nothing to date them against. What the museum does point to is a habit of the brush. Small calligraphic strokes repeat at a steady interval in the tassels of the clothes and headdresses, in the leaves of the plants, in the ringlets of hair, and together they set up a decorative pulse across the whole surface that he never used again. The story comes from the Book of Daniel, where two elders watch Susanna bathing in her garden and accuse her of adultery once she refuses them. Daniel does not name the two men. The Prado indexes them as Arquías and Sedequías, names that tradition attached to them later.