Сусанна и старцы

Rubens painted this small, dark canvas around 1606, during his second stay in Rome, and you can feel the city working on him. The story comes from the Book of Daniel, two respected old judges corner the young wife Susanna as she bathes and threaten to ruin her name unless she yields. Rubens catches the instant she twists away in alarm, the two leering faces pressing out of the shadow behind her. That heavy shadow torn by a single fall of light is Caravaggio, whose paintings Rubens was studying just then in the same churches where he worked. The pose of Susanna's body, meanwhile, borrows from an ancient Roman statue he had drawn. This is the earliest of several versions Rubens made of the subject, and her sharp, energetic turn would later feed straight into the young Bernini's marble of the fleeing Proserpina.