Susannah and the Elders

The story comes from an addition to the Book of Daniel. Susanna, a married woman, is bathing in her walled garden when two respected elders who have hidden there step out and demand that she sleep with them. She refuses, so they accuse her in public of adultery, a charge that carried death, until the young Daniel questions the two men separately and catches them contradicting each other. Painters loved the subject because it let them show a nude with a clear conscience. This canvas, painted around 1585 by Veronese and his workshop, is almost three metres wide, and it was made as a companion to a Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery that is also in Vienna, two stories of a woman accused of adultery. It belonged to the Duke of Buckingham in England before it was bought for the Habsburgs in 1649.