Suzanne et les vieillards

Tintoretto painted this in Venice around 1555, taking a story from the Book of Daniel about a virtuous wife spied on while she bathed in her garden. Two respected old men hide in the hedge and threaten to accuse her of adultery unless she gives in, and later they are exposed and she is cleared. Tintoretto shows the moment before any of that. Susanna sits in the light studying herself in a mirror, absorbed, while the two elders creep in at the edges of the foliage. Because she cannot see them but we can, the picture quietly puts the viewer in the same position as the men peering through the leaves. The steep, plunging space and the sharp contrast of light and shadow are the Mannerist tricks that made Tintoretto the boldest painter in Venice.