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Artemisia Gentileschi’s
Susanna and the Elders (1610) in the
Context of Counter-Reformation Rome
Patricia Simons
A
rtemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders,
signed and dated 1610 (fig. 1), is a signal state-
ment by a young female artist declaring her skill,
knowledge, and gender.1
Several scholars have elucidated
the sexual backdrop to this remarkable painting executed
by a seventeen-year-old on the brink of an independent
career.2
Gossip was circulating about the laxity of her
household, where she may have served as a model for her
father and was inadequately chaperoned. After the Susan-
na was signed, the painter Agostino Tassi had access to
the house and he began to teach her pictorial perspective.
In 1612 she was involved in a trial that showed he had
first deflowered her in May 1611 and thereafter repeated-
ly coerced her into sex. The canvas is often treated as a bi-
ographical response to her rape and intimidation but her
testimony at the trial dates the beginning of the harass-
ment to early May 1611.3
On the other hand, the painting
is undeniably a strong pronouncement of feminine virtue
and heroism, which counters innuendo about the young
artist’s immorality and emphasizes her steadfastness.
This essay examines the painting from a less personal,
more professional point of view. A matriculation work in
effect, it is not only a blatant assertion about chastity but
it is also daringly, immodestly designed to bring a female
painter to everyone’s notice at a time when the theme of
Susanna was of great interest in Counter-
Reformation Rome.
Susanna figured in the Catholic agenda of instituting
reform by embracing pious virtue and proclaiming itself
the Church Triumphant. Annibale Carracci’s engraving
of Susanna and the Elders, dated around 1590–95 (fig. 2),
and his subsequent panel painting of 1603 in the Galleria
Doria Pamphili (fig. 3) that has now been identified as
his rather than Domenichino’s, contributed to a marked
increase in the number of paintings devoted to the theme
that were produced either side of the turn of the century.4
Examples produced before 1610 include Baldassare
Croce’s rare, monumental fresco cycle of six scenes from
the Old Testament story in the church of Santa Susanna
(1598–1600; fig. 4).5
Usually, single paintings focused
on the episode of the confrontation with the Elders in
the garden where Susanna was bathing. Bellori credited
Lanfranco with copying Carracci’s 1603 panel and in
his life of Domenichino he described a Susanna and the
Elders work, and a variant sent to Flanders, of unclear
date.6
Malvasia also mentioned an early painting of the
subject by Domenichino, dating it to the time he resided
in the Roman household of the prelate and art theorist
Giovanni Battista Agucchi (c. 1604–08). This is possibly
the painting now in Munich, which shows the impact
of both Annibale’s print and the 1603 panel, though
Domenichino’s canvas seems to have been at the Villa
Ludovisi by 1623–24, which is nearly a decade before
Agucchi died.7
Other examples included several cabinet
paintings by an artist known to the Gentileschi family,
Cavalier d’Arpino, dated around 1606–07.8
Rubens’s
relatively small canvas was painted at more or less the
same time in Rome, very probably for Cardinal Scipione
Borghese, and shortly before 1609 Sisto Badalocchio, one
of Annibale Carracci’s pupils in Rome, produced a near life-
size canvas for an unknown patron.9
Some artists in Rome
were doubtless aware of Ludovico Carracci’s treatment
of the subject in Bologna painted around 1598 (fig. 5).10
Further examples included Northern prints, chiefly
Netherlandish, that were circulating through the
Italian peninsula.11
In a few cases, most notably Agostino Carracci’s
engraving of the 1580s or early 1590s (fig. 6), images of
the biblical heroine focus on the explicit sexual potential
of the story.12
But more often the heroine, emphatically
represented in the Bible as beautiful, learned, and
honorable, is beset by Elders who are vilified in numerous
discourses, including exegesis, comedies, and visual
culture.13
Even in Agostino’s engraving from the Lascivie
series, the overly eager groping by one unrestrained Elder
is clear, his obtrusive knee indicating phallic arousal of
bestial proportions, and the old man on the right crudely
masturbates, unable to control himself and thereby

2. 42
Fig. 1. Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, c. 1610, oil on canvas, 170 × 119 cm, Pommersfelden, Collection Graf von
Schönborn.

3. 43
Fig. 2. Annibale Carracci, Susanna and the Elders,
c. 1621–23, engraving and etching, second state,
34.6 × 31.1 cm, Washington D.C., National Gallery
of Art.
Fig. 3. Annibale Carracci, Susanna and the Elders, c. 1603, oil on wood panel, 56.8 × 86.1 cm, Rome, Galleria Doria Pamphilj. (Copyright 2016
Amministrazione Doria Pamphilj s.r.l.)

4. 44
Fig. 6. Agostino Carracci, Susanna and the Elders, c. 1585–95,
engraving, 15.5 × 11 cm, London, British Museum.
Fig. 7. Crispin de Passe the Elder (after Maarten de Vos), Susanna
and the Elders, c. 1600, engraving, 9.8 × 12.8 cm, Amsterdam,
Rijksmuseum.
Fig. 4. Baldassare Croce, Susanna and the Elders, c. 1598–1600,
fresco, Rome, S. Susanna.
Fig. 5. Ludovico Carracci, Susanna and the Elders, c. 1598, oil
on canvas, 170 × 132 cm, Modena, Banca Popolare dell’Emilia
Romagna.

5. 45
losing all dignity, respect, and venerability. He is no
better than the leering, self-pleasuring satyr depicted in
another engraving from Agostino’s series.14
The Elders
were understood as what we call ‘dirty old men’, ridiculed
and pictured as satyrs, generic Orientals and pagans,
evil and outrageously indecorous. In Annibal Caro’s play
The Scoundrels of 1543, a female servant angrily calls the
villain an ‘old lecher’ and ‘an Elder of Susanna’.15
Anton
Francesco Doni used the latter phrase in 1551 for a
pedant, that stock character always mocked in comedies.16
The inscription in a Dutch engraving issued around 1600
by Crispin de Passe the Elder after a design by Maarten de
Vos and well known in Rome refers to ‘the scheming and
prodigal Elders’ (fig. 7).17
Susanna’s imagery has been misunderstood, reduced
to a single reading about voyeuristic responses from
presumptively male viewers, an interpretation over-
determined by what has become a dismissive reading of
Tintoretto’s painting of the mid-1550s (fig. 8).18
Relying
on important but early analytical moves made by John
Berger in 1972 and Laura Mulvey in 1975, it can still be
claimed in 2012, erroneously, that ‘by inviting the (male)
viewer to identify with the perspective of the elders, such
paintings exonerate them; the fault now lies with Susanna,
whose self-absorption and vanity seem an open invitation
to the attentions of the elders’.19
However, Susanna is not
represented thus in textual discourse or pictorial examples
of the time. Note that one of Tintoretto’s men lurks on
the margin in the background while the other lies on the
ground, slithering like a serpent, each unsuccessfully
trying to intrude on the hortus conclusus of an admirable,
beautiful, contemplative heroine.
After the Reformation, although frequently illustrated
for Protestant projects, Susanna’s story carried particularly
authoritative resonance in Catholic contexts. St Jerome
had incorporated it within the Book of Daniel in his
fourth-century Latin translation of what was thereafter
canonical as the Vulgate Bible (used here). However,
Martin Luther placed the last two chapters in a separate
section of the Bible, the Apocrypha between the Old
and New Testaments, explaining that ‘these are books
not equal to Holy Scripture and yet useful and good to
read’.20
Calvinists went further and excluded the entire
Apocrypha from their Bible. The Council of Trent,
consolidating Catholicism after the Protestant challenge,
instead affirmed in April 1546, only four months after
its first meeting, that the Book of Daniel (including
chapter 13 on Susanna) was one of the ‘sacred and
canonical’ works that belonged in the Vulgate.21
Thus, in
the Catholic Bible it was the penultimate chapter in the
Book of Daniel, an authoritative location affirmed in 1566
when the theologian Sixtus of Siena devised the term
‘deuterocanonical’ to characterize a distinction from truly
apocryphal texts.22
By examining more closely the ‘period
eye’ or viewing conditions and expectations regarding
Susanna during the early Counter Reformation, we can
gain a better understanding of what drove Artemisia
Gentileschi to produce her first version of the subject
in 1610.
Theological and
Allegorical Interpretations of
Susanna
Several core themes in the patristic praise of Susanna were
especially apposite for the Counter Reformation, and I
single out four that resonate with Artemisia Gentileschi’s
concept and substantially account for the interest in
Susanna around 1610.23
One is that Susanna was an
allegorical figure for the Catholic Church; another was that
she too, like Judith, was an Old Testament embodiment
of heroic virtue; a third aspect was that she exemplified
chastity and resistance to temptation; while a fourth
theme related her story to justice and salvation.
Church authorities since at least Hippolytus in the
early third century allegorized her as Ecclesia, beset by
Jews and pagans. Representing the Church threatened
yet triumphant, Susanna featured in the frescoed
vaults painted around 1492–94 by Pinturicchio and his
workshop within the Borgia apartments of the Vatican
palace, hemmed in by men dressed in the exotic costumes
of Jews and Turks who encroach on her rose-hedged
hortus conclusus.24
Contrasting Susanna with non-Christian
opponents, although illogical since she was a Jew, worked
on an allegorical level to dramatize her embodiment
of ultimate victory over infidels, a theme with special
resonance during the Catholic battle against the rise of
Protestantism. Jewish or Arabic ethnicity is indicated
by the stereotypical hook-nose, curly black hair and dark
brown skin of the rightmost Elder in Rubens’s canvas,
which was painted in Rome and has long been in the
Borghese collection. By contrast with the wolfish and
infidel Elders, Susanna was the sponsa or faithful bride, the
Church that will always be united with Christ. St Jerome’s
allegorical ‘figura Susannae Ecclesiae’ remained over a
millennium later still a powerful authority for Cornelius à
Lapide, a Flemish Jesuit who taught for many years at the
Collegio Romano and who first published his commentary
on Daniel in 1621. In proper Counter-Reformation spirit
and turn to hierarchical authority, he added to Jerome’s

6. 46
passage that Daniel was a type for the Pope, adjusting a
medieval tradition that paralleled Daniel with a priest.25
Secondly, Susanna allegorized female virtue and
bravery, a common patristic theme that was paid new
attention during the Counter Reformation revival of
interest in the Church Fathers. St Augustine had imagined
Susanna as one of ‘God’s athletes’, noting that she ‘had a
lesson to teach religious married women. She taught them
to resist the tempter, taught them to fight, taught them
to struggle, taught them to implore God’s help’.26
He went
on to recommend the model of Joseph for men, but he
first acknowledged Susanna’s mighty effort: ‘We were on
the lookout for God’s athlete (athletam Dei), for a virtuous
spirit, we saw her opponent closing with her. We shared
the winner’s triumph over her defeated foe’. Her spiritual
courage and physical effort made her an exemplar of
fidelity, even when a husband might falsely suspect a wife,
because all would eventually be well, even if only after
death. ‘Her conscience is open (nuda)’ to God, who ‘sets
her free for eternity from her temporary oppression’.
Thirdly, artists and viewers were trained through the
centuries to contrast Susanna with women like Eve rather
than assimilate the two. Hippolytus said that the devil
was ‘concealed in the Elders’ who would, like the serpent
in the garden, try ‘a second time [to] corrupt Eve’, but this
was not to say that Susanna was as weak as Eve. Rather,
he said she ‘prefigured the Church’ and was ‘a pure
bride to God’, one of several ways in which Susanna was
typologically akin to the Virgin Mary.27
Whereas Eve was
successfully tempted by the serpent and then lured Adam,
Susanna refused to be enticed by the threat of the Elders
and resolutely remained chaste.28
Thus she was the counter
to Eve, for, as pointed out by a text attributed at the time
to the fifth-century Church Father John Chrysostom, she
resisted the serpent in a ‘paradise’ and dwelled instead
in the Mariological ‘hortus conclusus, fons signatus’, the
enclosed garden and sealed spring of the Old Testament’s
Song of Songs (‘a close garden; hedged all about, a spring
shut in and sealed […] a stream bordered with garden’,
4:12, 15).29
In 1602, the Jesuit Andreas Schott, Rubens’s
associate, had printed this homily thought to be by
Chrysostom. And around the same time, in the Roman
library of Cardinal Colonna, Rubens’s brother Philip
discovered a sermon by the fourth-century St Asterius,
representing Susanna as stronger than Adam, resisting
‘the workmen of sin. The weakness of the first man was
not found in the young woman of Babylon’.30
That is,
Susanna is the opposite of Eve and even Adam, for it is the
Elders who cannot resist carnal temptation, whereas she
is resolute, willing to die rather than give her body over to
the lustful, uncontrolled, conspiratorial, and threatening
men.
Fig. 8. Tintoretto,
Susanna and the
Elders, c. 1555–56,
oil on canvas,
146 × 193.6 cm,
Vienna,
Kunsthistorisches
Museum.

7. 47
To the extent that the ‘enduring literary topos’ of
the ‘garden of love’ is sometimes associated with the
enclosed garden in the amorous yet biblical Song of
Songs, Susanna’s surroundings might for some scholars
and artists suggest a ‘sexually allusive garden setting’.31
The Bible consistently describes the backdrop as a fruit
garden, specifying that it is her husband’s domain
(Daniel 13.7) and thereby accentuating the degree to
which the Elders are also invading and misusing a man’s
property.32
Crucially, when Daniel interrogated the
Elders separately, one spoke of a mastic tree, the other
of a holm oak, both of which were thus thought to be
plausibly present in the wooded orchard and implicitly
close to its wall since the man in tryst with Susanna they
supposedly saw was quickly able to escape through the
garden gate.33
A secluded place where the elite woman
could choose to bathe in privacy and without shame, it
was for commentators like the fourth-century Church
Father St Ambrose a paradise. After quoting the Song of
Songs, he noted ‘Susanna was in a paradise […] Where the
virgin is, there, too, is the chaste wife’.34
Susanna’s virtue is
made all the more evident because the Elders pervert that
paradisal setting, parodied as suffering from dementia
as well as indecency when depicted eagerly perched in or
near an apple tree in the case of Rubens’ canvas in Munich
(c. 1636–40), for instance, or depicted in a serpentine
posture by Tintoretto (fig. 8).
A fourth theme of Susanna’s story, that of justice,
is more often featured in secular chambers of law and
governing councils, but the religious aspect of deliverance
and salvation meant that she could allegorically embody
the virtues of Justice and Fortitude. When such issues as
false accusation and the corruption then correction of the
law were addressed in visual terms, Daniel’s intervention
was usually included, but even the initial scene of lechery
implied the degradation of law as well as morality because
the Elders were judges (Daniel 13.5). Potential abuse of the
legal system and political critique crept in to presentations
of Susanna’s story, notably with Ferrante Pallavicino’s
popular and satirical La Susanna, first published in Venice
in 1636.
It is striking that the Bible marks Susanna as
particularly learned in the law (Daniel 13.3). Indicative of
this is the fact that she cries out (Daniel 13.24), which is
one of the conditions of proof that rape had taken place
according to Deuteronomy 22.24. Even though she was
not yet raped, Susanna astutely responded to the threat.
During Tassi’s trial in 1612, one of the standard questions
put to Artemisia was whether she had made an outcry, to
which she replied that she had been gagged.35
Susanna’s
open mouth is dramatically contrasted with the new
gesture of silence made by the Elder looming over her in
Carracci’s panel of 1603 (fig. 3), a contrast reiterated in
Artemisia’s canvas of 1610 (fig. 1) and strengthened by her
compact arrangement of all six hands. Attention to biblical
and secular law in these works adds to the naturalism
and plausibility required for Counter-Reformation art,
in Artemisia’s case probably driven also by a common
understanding amongst women regarding how they
must, like Susanna, cry out loudly when defending their
honor. Susanna’s salvation due to divinely inspired justice
had implications beyond the law too. She is one of the
models named in the prayer for those in extremis; the
Ordo commendationis animae, the recommendation of a
departing soul, includes the plea: ‘Lord, free his soul as you
freed Susanna from her false crime’.36
The petition was still
in use in the seventeenth century, printed, for example, at
Bologna in 1612.37
The Corrective Gaze
Rather than apply a seemingly universal model of ‘the
male gaze’ to images of Susanna, we need to move
beyond the habit of simply identifying viewers with
pictured figures of the same sex. In particular, Catholic
guidelines emphasized what could be called a ‘corrective
gaze’, urging viewers to recognize, condemn, and thereby
avoid, sinful actions. Further, male viewers were meant
to empathize with Susanna’s plight, a task made easier by
her several allegorical connotations. As Catholic reform
gathered momentum after the Council of Trent concluded
in 1563, several important treatises pointed to ways
in which images like Susanna and the Elders could aid
devotional practice.
Augustine’s linkage between Susanna and another
Old Testament figure, Joseph, by reason of the male
hero’s staunch resistance to the wiles of Potiphar’s wife
(akin to Susanna’s brave chastity upheld against the
devious Elders), was accentuated in the rulings of the
Second Church Council of Nicaea that met in 787. Its
decree on the proper use of religious imagery was cited as
authoritative (though not quoted) in the Council of Trent’s
ruling of 1563 regarding sacred art.38
The full Nicene text,
including its guidelines on Old Testament subjects, was
printed in a multi-volume collection of the acts of various
Church councils issued in 1567, a project that suited
the goal of the Catholic reformation to re-establish the
Church’s institutional authority on firm and historically
supported foundations.39
The relevant passage on Susanna

8. 48
was subsequently repeated, word for word, in Johann
Molanus’s post-Tridentine treatise of 1570 on sacred
imagery, and it was repeated exactly in Cardinal Paleotti’s
Discorso published in Italian in 1582 and then in Latin
in 1594:
If someone has fallen in love with a prostitute, the Church
proposes to him the image of chaste Joseph, who execrated
adultery and overcame it through temperance. Elsewhere,
again, it exhibits the blessed Susanna, a shining example of
continence, pleading for aid from on high with her hands
extended, […] [against] the impious elders.40
In other words, Susanna was officially positioned as
a worthy, effective subject, and precisely to vanquish
temptation rather than to encourage voyeurism and lust.
Subsequent expanded editions of Molanus’s text
and the widely disseminated Latin version of Paleotti’s
unfinished work as well as its earlier issue in Italian
ensured that Susanna was a crucial figure for the
exploration and management of morality during the
formative decades of Counter Reformation art. Gregorio
Comanini’s dialogue on art theory, the Figino published
in 1591, also reaffirmed the Nicene ruling on the
subject of Susanna when extensively summarizing its
instructions regarding the proper function of painting.41
The sexual content of Susanna’s story was precisely why
the Church allowed, even encouraged, its representation.
In an important sense, epitomized by Origen’s practice
of interpretation, allegory was a process of sublimation
and the Nicene text implied the standard view that
exemplarity overrode lust.
The historical reception of the figure of Susanna
is further elucidated in Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s treatise
of 1584 on painting, translated into English in 1598.
One passage discusses various responses art can elicit
from viewers, most of which imagine identification or
resemblance with the depicted mood or subject, such
as falling asleep upon seeing ‘a sweete-sleeping picture’,
being stirred to fury when beholding a lively battle scene,
or having ‘a fellow-feeling when it is afflicted’, that is,
when suffering is shown.42
In a related vein, desire can be
pricked, as viewers would want to eat painted ‘dainties’ or
the presumptively male viewer will be moved ‘to desire a
beautifull young woman for his wife, when he seeth her
painted naked’. Lastly, he mentions what I am calling the
corrective gaze, though in an especially resolute, negative
manner: viewers will ‘be stirred with disdaine and wrath,
at the sight of shameful dishonest actions’. This last clearly
suits the despicable Elders, for whom viewers were to
exercise the emotive strategy of contempt and avoidance.
Lomazzo, a secular writer and former painter,
acknowledged the arousal of erotic desire as a core effect,
rendered legitimate by being couched in marital terms
and only for male viewers. The responses of disdain and
empathy also apply to Susanna imagery, however, and
clearly not in relation to any sympathy for the Elders.
Susanna’s nudity was appropriate to the narrative moment
of bathing, but it also stimulated an empathetic response
from viewers regarding her virtue and vulnerability,
especially when the female nude functioned in well-
established terms as the archetype of idealized beauty and,
at times, as the allegorical embodiment of such abstract,
non-corporeal concepts as truth, innocence, and purity.
Paleotti’s spirituali, that is, all Christian viewers, are to be
emotionally stirred when pondering sacred images, seeing
with their eyes and going further with their mind (col
pensiero), engaging with both their ‘flesh and spirit’ (carne
e spirito).43
Rather than identify with the voyeuristic Elders, as
is often assumed, male viewers were to abhor the lechers
and empathize with and admire Susanna. It was valid for
the image of Susanna to attract the eye, her innocent,
pure flesh glowing against the garden’s vegetation
in contradistinction to the secretive, heavily draped,
scheming, sly elders. Naked flesh in religious art carried
a range of connotations, from the Christ Child’s male
humanity to the adult Christ’s suffering on the cross or a
female martyr’s agony and humiliation, but some nudity
aroused mystical and pious adoration – a heightened,
charged response that was always in danger of becoming
too earthly and erotic.44
While Susanna’s image served
erotic interests on occasion, that was far from a universal
practice, and guidelines about Counter-Reformation art
especially eschewed viewing that was deemed lascivious.
During Gregory XV’s papacy (1621 to mid-1623), an
inscription was added to the second state of Annibale
Carracci’s print (fig. 2) explicitly addressing Francesco
Gualdo, a collector of antiquities who was in his mid-
forties: ‘The honor and the sacred glory of the people
of Rimini, Gualdo, you who enjoy the monuments of
antiquity. Take the example of Susanna, tested without
falling. Let ancestral faith signify what ancestral love
is’.45
Reminiscent of the crouching Venus at her bath,
Carrracci’s Susanna rewrites that desirable figure of
antiquity so that viewers like Gualdo are exhorted to
follow ‘ancestral love’ that is instead centered on ancient
but biblical virtue.46
His gaze upon the monumental
female form with its crucially concealed genital region is
invited, since Susanna was steadfast in the face of death
threats, valiantly preserved her chastity, remained loyal
to her spouse, and trusted in salvation from God alone.
Her story, with its point about lewdness and temptation
denied, established a tough challenge – the ‘test’ referred

9. 49
to in Carracci’s inscription – alongside the reassurance that
divine intervention would ensure the victory
of righteousness.
During the early Counter Reformation, artists
experimented with a variety of ways in which to picture
the challenge of Susanna’s tale, explicitly signaling that
the response of male viewers was not to be ‘incontinent’
in terms of the Nicene precept reiterated by Molanus and
Paleotti. In the year 1600, for instance, Jacopo da Empoli
selected the early moment in which the Elders still lurk in
the bushes, barely visible in the distance, and the servants
have not left Susanna, who remains clothed.47
She and a
servant have barely begun to untie her bodice and attached
sleeve in preparation for the bath, thereby keeping her
decorously clad and demure for all viewers. Despite
one Elder tugging her bathing cloth in one direction,
and Susanna pulling it toward the opposite end of the
horizontal, Annibale’s painting of 1603 (fig. 3) uses that
pristine sheet to cover much of her nakedness. His earlier
print (fig. 2) carefully arranged Susanna so that the cloth
is gathered in her lap, covering the crucial genital area, a
strategy followed by Croce (fig. 4), who takes as his model
the figure in the print, but reversed.
Around 1598, Ludovico Carracci included at the upper
left of his canvas (fig. 5) a cherub shielding its eyes from
the dastardly scene, looking toward the spectator and
gesturing in instructive admonishment. Ludovico and
many other artists emphasize that Susanna looks not
so much at the Elders but rather seeks upwards for her
salvation. As the Bible puts it, when describing her trial,
she ‘looked up to heaven, in token that her heart had
not lost confidence in the Lord’ (Daniel 13.35). Lapide’s
commentary in 1621 stressed that Susanna raised her
eyes and face to the heavens and Carracci’s panel of 1603
(fig. 3) shows that biblical response.48
So too does Susanna
beseech the heavens, looking up far over the viewer’s right
shoulder, in Artemisia’s Burghley House canvas of Susanna
(signed and dated 1622). The upward gaze occurs again
in her Brno Susanna of 1649 along with a variation on
Susanna’s gestures from the 1610 painting.49
Ludovico Carracci’s contrast of one Elder’s large,
ruddy paw on Susanna’s untainted, luminescent flesh, is
shocking, eliciting from viewers of any sex an appropriate
response of revulsion, and sympathy for Susanna. Artists
often accentuated that repulsive disparity of age and
gender by juxtaposing skin tone and quality. Massimo
Stanzione in the 1630s, for example, has Susanna defend
herself while recoiling, the impulse of her drawn back body
initiated by her pink, delicate hand forcefully pushing
against the brown-veined, aging hand of one Elder who
grabs at a corner of her bathing sheet.50
The contrast of
pale feminine flesh against brown masculine skin also
plays out in the sandaled feet of the predominant
Elder and Susanna’s bare feet placed along the base
of the painting.
In Rome, Artemisia Gentileschi was likely aware of the
nudity in Carracci’s print (fig. 2) and also in Croce’s fresco
cycle about the Old Testament figure of Susanna produced
from 1598 (fig. 4), finished in time for the Jubilee year
of 1600, adorning the public space of a church dedicated
to an early Christian martyr of the same name. Croce’s
expansive garden view, including the peacock, partly
derives from de Passe’s engraving (fig. 7), while Susanna is
reminiscent of Annibale Carracci’s conception, especially
with bunched drapery in her lap and one arm stretched
across the torso in contrapuntal movement.
Female nudity on a monumental scale in a Counter-
Reformation church may seem surprising, given the
decree from the Council of Trent issued in 1563 that
in sacred imagery ‘all lasciviousness [is to be] avoided,
so that images shall not be painted and adorned with a
seductive charm’.51
But Susanna’s story was exceptional,
as the revival of the Nicene precept makes clear. The
Tridentine council also decreed that all imagery had to be
approved by the bishop.52
Notably, Girolamo Rusticucci,
the cycle’s patron and church’s titular cardinal, was also
the vicar general of Rome who had, in December 1593,
decreed that drawings of all work being done in that city’s
churches must be submitted for approval.53
When he died
in June 1603, the decree was promulgated again by his
successor as vicar general, Cardinal Camillo Borghese,
who also headed the Roman Inquisition before rising to
the papacy as Paul V in 1605. In other words, both the
story and the heroine’s nudity on display in Santa Susanna
were considered appropriate by even the most central and
censorial of ecclesiastical authorities.
During the excitement and activities of the Jubilee,
the child Artemisia Gentileschi may well have visited
Santa Susanna to see one of the major pictorial works
commissioned for the occasion, perhaps in the company
of her mother (who died in late 1605) or her father,
the painter Orazio Gentileschi. Then and also in the
subsequent decade, the subject of Susanna might have
attracted her particular attention. In monumental form,
the theme enhanced a newly renovated church that
had a significant history associated with women. As
part of an urban renewal project designed to advance
Counter-Reformation piety, in the 1580s Pope Sixtus V’s
sister Camilla Peretti began the church’s renovation and
decoration.54
She also added a convent for Cistercian nuns,

10. 50
where they established a boarding school for poor girls
at risk of becoming prostitutes, and Peretti funded nine
dowries per year for some of these pupils to take vows
there. The virtuous Old Testament heroine was an ideal
exemplar for such girls, refusing to succumb to sexual
coercion and interpreted as the opposite type of femininity
to that of the temptress Eve. Just as the unyielding
chastity of both Joseph and Susanna was a model for
male viewers, propounded anew by Molanus and Paleotti,
Susanna was additionally well suited not only to married
women but also nuns and their pupils.55
Artemisia Gentileschi’s Investment
in the Subject of Susanna
Artemisia made a wise choice for her first signed painting,
selecting a popular, pious subject that catered to values
current in Counter-Reformation Rome.56
It was also a
valid mode for displaying the female nude, to be one of her
strongest selling points, without contravening standards
of female honor. Either a mythological subject or the
Biblical story of Bathsheba would also have given her the
opportunity to demonstrate her talent, and she did explore
the latter, erotic tale once she was a married woman.
But Susanna provided an ideally decorous narrative
with allegorical implications, which was suitable to an
unmarried (that is, virginal) maiden, as Artemisia claimed
to have been before Tassi deflowered her.57
Venturing to present to the art market a near life-size
painting of the female nude, Artemisia needed to preserve
her reputation in order to secure a good marriage and
attract well-regarded patrons. Another aim may have
been to counter gossip, for testimony at the later trial
included several reports of her immodesty along with
other accounts that instead indicated her respectability.
According to an artisan who was a friend of both Tassi
and Orazio Gentileschi, one rumor was that Orazio ‘made
her pose in the nude and liked for people to watch her’.58
Whether or not there was any truth to such scandalous
tales, they were very damaging and Orazio filed suit
against this man and several others for bearing false
witness. Susanna and the Elders was another way to avert or
refute such chatter, though it was a daring, risky move and
may in fact have done as much to generate such rumors as
to dispel them.
The young Artemisia could not afford to appear
licentious or seem to be catering to a market for erotica.
Rather, she had to adhere to the Tridentine standards
explained by Paleotti and widespread by 1610. He
described four ways in which proper images should be
constructed. Two were intellectual: following the best
rules of art and disegno and also being knowledgeable
about the subjects. Two others were on the emotional
level (all’affetto): ensuring that the art would ‘stimulate the
senses’ and using art to ‘excite spirituality and devotion’
(l’una nel muovere il senso, l’altra nell’eccitare lo spirito e la
divozione).59
There were also four ‘grades or professions’ of
viewers, ‘painters, the learned, the illiterate [that is, the
unlearned and vernacular audience], and the spiritual’ (i
pittori, i letterati, gl’idioti e gli spirituali). Artemisia’s first
Susanna has sufficient artistic and intellectual quality,
being competent in design and composition, as well
as appearing informed about the subject and about
contemporary art. Pittori and letterati, artists and the
learned elite, would thus be satisfied. Paleotti’s sense of
affective impact was addressed to idioti, by which he meant
not only the illiterate but also anyone unable to read Latin,
and to spirituali, defined as all Christians. A variety of
colors and other embellishments were to draw the eyes
of the general populace, and these touches of artifice and
charm indeed enrich Artemisia’s Susanna. It also conforms
to Paleotti’s insistence on ‘a lively imitation of the true’ and
‘as much clarity as possible […] so that the viewer quickly
and easily recognizes what it is meant to represent’ so that
‘those of greater intelligence can easily explain it to the
illiterates’.60
The fledgling Artemisia cleverly achieved the powerful
intellectual and emotional impact of the Susanna by
highlighting her strengths and concealing shortcomings in
her early skills. As a woman with limited access to artistic
circles and collections, her knowledge of previous art was
lower than Paleotti’s ideal standard, and she could not
be seen to have access to male models.61
The indecorous
nature of observing models of the opposite sex is indicated
by the rumor circulating about Orazio posing his daughter
naked.62
Susanna’s body depicted by male artists is based
on male models or previous works of art, seemingly by
adopting an idealized, aesthetic distance from real naked
women. Artemisia declared in 1610 (fig. 1) that she had
unusual, valuable knowledge of actual female bodies
and rare, decorous access to female models. Around the
same time, or within a year of the Susanna, she again
tackled anatomical exactitude in a feminine subject rife
with devotional merit. Her Madonna and Child now in
the Galleria Spada shows a tender, intimate moment of
breastfeeding, distinguished by a naturalistically pliable
breast. While the composition is based on Agostino
Carracci’s print of the subject, Artemisia’s models were
probably her neighbor and frequent chaperone Tuzia

11. 51
and that woman’s young son, who indeed posed for her
according to the trial testimony.63
For his figure of Susanna, Ludovico Carracci (fig. 5)
referred to Michelangelo’s Eve painted in The Temptation of
Adam and Eve on the Sistine Ceiling. By way of a drawing
or print, he unmistakably adjusted Eve’s thick thigh, her
contrapposto, twisted body, her turned neck, as well as her
raised arm on the right, now reaching not for the apple
proffered by the serpent but struggling against another
embodiment of evil, a white-bearded Elder. The citation
not only achieves the effects of aesthetic idealization and
intertextual meaning, whereby Susanna is emphatically the
opposite of Eve, but it also casts Susanna as a monumental
hero by endowing her with a Michelangelesque, more
masculine build. That approach is also evident in Annibale’s
print and Croce’s fresco (figs 2, 4), increasing Susanna’s
status as the personification of virtue and pious courage.
Like Ludovico in Bologna, Artemisia resorted to prints
and perhaps drawings for inspiration. In particular, she
was clearly aware of Annibale’s print (fig. 2), choosing
a similarly ovoid stone bench and adjusting the pose of
the legs. But she cleverly changed the background and
tempered the corporeal strategy, in order to emphasize her
unique information. Possibly using Tuzia as her model,
the Susanna disavows idealization and instead puts earlier
paintings and statuary to different, more naturalistic use.
In Caravaggesque terms, her conceptualization insists on
the figure’s convincing presence by means of a soft breast
with a lifelike areole and creases at the stomach, waist,
underarms, and elbows, heightening the immediacy and
plausibility of the biblical drama.
Also like Ludovico, she evoked the Sistine Ceiling, but
by appropriating expelled Adam’s gesture rather than the
body type of temptress Eve (fig. 9).64
Adam’s motion of
despair and acknowledgment of sin becomes Artemisia’s
affetto of disruption and refusal of sin. Unable to see the
Sistine chapel first hand since it was restricted to male
viewers, Artemisia would have relied on the print after
Michelangelo’s Expulsion that is attributed to Marcantonio
Raimondi (here reproduced in reverse for the sake of
comparison).65
The engraved figures appear in the same
direction as those of the Sistine fresco, so the artist
corrected for the necessary reversal that results from the
process of printing. But Artemisia probably did not know
this, and thought she was amending the gesture so that
it better referred to Michelangelo, and thus her canvas
echoes the actual fresco in reverse. The alteration indicates
that she relied on the print rather than a drawing.
Yet the engraving is only briefly mentioned, if at all,
as a source, usually in favor of Michelangelo’s fresco
itself, which Artemisia could not have seen.66
The
solution has been to propose that Artemisia looked to
the same ancient relief that inspired Michelangelo, a
sarcophagus since identified as representing the myth
of Orestes. Unfortunately, the example reproduced was
only unearthed in 1839, and the extended arm clutches
cloth.67
There are three surviving reliefs of Orestes with
even closer gestures, two of which were definitely in Rome
at the time: one in the Giustiniani collection, the other
once visible at S. Maria in Aracoeli, and then moved to
the Barberini collection sometime in the seventeenth or
eighteenth century.68
The situation is further complicated
by references to the gestures by several earlier artists like
Titian and their adaptation by Orazio Gentileschi in his
David usually dated c. 1607–09 (fig. 10), which may result
from figural arrangements in both the Sistine ceiling
frescoes and the Orestes-type relief.69
Adam’s gestures may have been appropriated by
Michelangelo from the ancient sarcophagus (though in
reverse), but I would argue that Artemisia’s Susanna is
only from the print after Michelangelo (fig. 9). Susanna’s
splayed fingers of the raised hand at the end of the
extended arm are not in the carved relief but Adam shares
Fig. 9. Marcantonio Raimondi (after Michelangelo), Expulsion of
Adam and Eve from Paradise, (reproduced in reverse), c. 1510–25,
engraving, 19.8 × 14.2 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum
of Art.

12. 52
them. That hand is also closer to the equivalent one in
the print than to her father’s David, as is the other bent
arm. She and Orazio each probably worked from the
engraving in their household studio, both reversing it, and
her citations from the print show her independence and
canny filtration. The hand on our left, for instance, does
not clutch David’s sword hilt but is raised even closer to
the neck than it is in Michelangelo’s prototype, shrewdly
masking the awkward junction between Susanna’s neck
and shoulder.70
The unusual representation of Susanna
with head turned downward rather than looking to the
heavens is explained by Artemisia’s adherence to the
Sistine precedent. Paleotti’s pittori and letterati could
admire her aesthetic knowledge and ability to render
complex bodily movements.
Availing herself of graphic materials at hand in her
father’s studio and perhaps oral reports more than
first-hand viewing, Artemisia’s painting nevertheless
insists that certain limitations on her as a woman
can be overcome. She ambitiously declares that she is
both knowledgeable about the very best art and about
female anatomy, as well as demonstrating her ability to
cater to current Counter-Reformation values. Paleotti’s
requirement that the artist’s knowledge be seen is thereby
fulfilled, as is his recommendation for plausible naturalism,
‘a lively imitation of the true’, along with fulfilling the
essential emotive and effective functions ‘to delight, to
instruct, and to move’.71
On the other hand, she was incapable of painting
Susanna’s lush garden. Landscape was virtually non-
existent in her paintings until the 1630s and even then she
commonly hired other artists to execute the backdrops of
landscape and architecture, which may still be the case for
her Susanna of 1649 now in Brno (see Garrard, fig, 19).72
I
suspect it was for this reason that Tassi was hired: to teach
her what is always referred to in the trial documents as
‘prospettiva’, the handling of spatial recession, which is
markedly absent in 1610.73
At the time, representations
of Susanna had her surrounded by dark foliage or a
balustraded bathing pool, though Annibale’s print (fig. 2)
indicates a solid wall with crosshatched gate. Artemisia
develops that enclosure to a unique extreme, the solid,
stony structure forcing compression close to the picture
plane and accentuating the hero’s entrapment. It also acts
as a darker, severe foil to her naked, light-toned, and soft
flesh, ensuring that all eyes are drawn to the artist’s special
skill with female nudes. Her Susanna is still secluded
(conclusus), but in no sort of hortus, when ensnared by the
plotting Elders.
Conclusion
Whereas Artemisia’s sexual history has been associated
with the painting, and the subject is frequently regarded
as no more than an excuse for voyeuristic viewing for
a male audience, this study has demonstrated that the
painting sprang from a different context, both religious
and artistic, in Counter-Reformation Rome. Yet there may
be one particular historical impetus for the city’s interest
in Susanna that does have a sexual tenor. An overlooked
sexual scandal may have influenced Artemisia, along with
many other artists and patrons taking on the subject of
Susanna in the early seventeenth century. The young
noblewoman Beatrice Cenci had undergone a controversial
year-long investigation and trial leading to her execution
in September 1599 when she was accused of arranging the
murder of her abusive, incestuous father. Her ordeals and
death engendered sympathy amongst Romans that in turn
probably informed some images of the sexually threatened
and wrongly accused Susanna.74
Notably, even under
torture, Cenci never confessed.
Fig. 10. Orazio Gentileschi, David and Goliath, c. 1607–09, oil on
canvas, 185.5 × 136 cm, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland.

13. 53
As we have seen, Susanna’s tribulations made her a
symbol for justice and salvation. Commenting on the
short verse forty-four in the Old Testament’s chapter on
Susanna, ‘And the Lord listened to her plea’, Lapide drew
out implications that would have resonated with Cenci’s
many sympathizers: ‘Teach, here, how effective are the
prayers of the accused who have been condemned to death,
especially an unjust death. God, the father of orphans and
the afflicted, feels compassion for them and helps them’.75
Lomazzo’s notion of empathy with many depicted subjects,
which was a widespread concept of visual reception, would
have encouraged an association between the sufferings of
Susanna and Cenci. The biblical figure may well have been
held up to Cenci as a model, not acquitted on earth but
promised salvation before what Lapide called the ‘tribunal
Dei’, the judgment seat of God.
Against widespread public sentiment, Cenci was
decapitated by order of the Pope, and then, as required
by her last testament, she was buried at San Pietro in
Montorio after a large public funeral procession.76
That
very church appears in the background of Croce’s final
scene in the Susanna cycle, where thanks are offered
for Susanna’s deliverance. A more generic façade with a
campanile appeared in the preliminary drawing, whereas
the final fresco shows Bramante’s circular Tempietto at
Montorio, a distinctive circular structure built as a tomb.77
The fresco subtly hints at the commemoration of Cenci,
who is made into a virtual martyr, which is how the
populace had come to view the young Beatrice. Similarly
beautiful, aristocratic, and resistant to sexual force,
Susanna ultimately triumphed and stood as an example
of secular as well as divine justice, an outcome people
believed had been denied the Roman woman in 1599.
It was not only Artemisia Gentileschi who could
combine the personal with the political and the pious with
the professional in Counter-Reformation Rome. But she
did so with particular inventiveness and acuity, as well as
consistent interest, for she signed and dated at least three
other treatments of the subject in later years.78
While
her earliest signed canvas is usually positioned as the
exception to an otherwise merely eroticized Old Testament
character, Susanna was in actuality exemplary and
appealing for female as well as male viewers, held up anew
during the Counter Reformation as an inspiration to avoid
immorality. In novel, thoughtful, and ambitious ways,
Artemisia’s painting engages with the pictorial dynamics,
religious values, and social concerns of her time.
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NOTES
1. See esp. Mary D. Garrard, ‘Artemisia and
Susanna’, in Feminism and Art History:
Questioning the Litany, ed. by Norma Broude
and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper
and Row, 1982), 147–71 (expanded in
the following reference); Mary D. Garrard,
Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female
Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1989), 183–
209; R. Ward Bissell, Artemisia Gentileschi
and the Authority of Art: Critical Reading
and Catalogue Raisonné (Philadelphia:
Pennsylvania State University Press,
1999), pp. 2–10, 187–89, cat. no. 2; Judith
Mann’s entry in Keith Christiansen and
Judith Mann (eds), Orazio and Artemisia
Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters
in Baroque Italy, exh. cat. (New York: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2001),
pp. 296–99, cat. no. 51.
2. Garrard, ‘Artemisia and Susanna’;
Elisabeth S. Cohen, ‘The Trials of
Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History’,
Sixteenth Century Journal, 31 (2000),
47–75; Elizabeth Cropper, ‘Life on the
Edge: Artemisia Gentileschi, Famous
Woman Painter’, in Orazio and Artemisia
Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters
in Baroque Italy, exh. cat., ed. by Keith
Christiansen and Judith W. Mann (New
York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art;
New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2001), 263–81. The association of
Artemisia’s painting with her rape and
trial in Robert Hahn, ‘Caught in the Act:
Looking at Tintoretto’s Susanna’, The
Massachusetts Review, 45 (2004), 633–47
(p. 641) is made in the discomforting
context of indulging in fantasies about
female suffering.
3. Eva Menzio (ed.), Artemisia Gentileschi:
Lettere precedute da Atti di un processo
per stupro, (Milan: Abscondita, 2004),
pp. 17–20; Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi:
The Image of the Female Hero, pp. 20, 204,
414–16. Artemisia’s testimony relates
that Tassi first began pressing her sexually
on the feast day of the Holy Cross, which
fell on 3 May, and the rape occurred a
week or so later. Since Rome followed
the Gregorian calendar, decreed in 1582,
Artemisia’s Susanna was completed by 31
December 1610.
4. Diane DeGrazia Bohlin, Prints and
Related Drawings by the Carracci Family:
A Catalogue Raisonné (National Gallery of
Art, Washington D.C., 1979), pp. 444–45,
cat. no. 14; Justus Sadeler issued a
copy in reverse by 1620 (B.XVIII.180.1
copy). For the painting see Andrea De
Marchi, ‘Annibale e non Domenichino
(una rettifica importante)’, Paragone,
52.37–38 (2001): 120–27. For several
images of Susanna at the time, see Ann
Sutherland Harris, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi:
The Literate Illiterate or Learning from
Example’, in Docere Delectare Movere:
Affetti, devozione e retorica nel linguaggio
artistico del primo barocco romano, ed. by
Sible de Blaauw and others (Rome: De
Luca, 1998), 105–20 (pp. 110–13).
5. Morton Colp Abromson, Painting in
Rome during the Papacy of Clement VIII
(1592–1605): A Documented Study (New
York: Garland, 1981), pp. 139–41, 355–56;
Rossella Vodret, ‘La decorazione interna’,
in Santa Susanna e San Bernardo alle Terme,
ed. by Anna Maria Affanni, Marina Cogotti
and Rossella Vodret (Rome: Fratelli Palombi
Editori, 1993), 28–35; Pamela Jones,
Altarpieces and their Viewers in the Churches
of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 30–38.
6. Giovann Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori,
scultori et architetti moderni (Rome:
Mascardi, 1672), pp. 86, 294; Giovan
Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern
Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans.
by Alice Sedgwick Wohl (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005),
pp. 102, 241.
7. Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice.
Lives of the Bolognese Painters, 16 vols
(London: Harvey Miller, 2012), XIII:
Lives of Domenichino and Francesco Gessi,
ed. by Lorenzo Pericolo, trans. by Anne
Summerscale (2013), pp. 50–51, 157 n. 39;
Richard Spear, Domenichino (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 149–51,
cat. no. 29 (as c. 1606–08). On relations
between Agucchi and Domenichino see
Patricia Simons, ‘Portraiture and Portrayal:
Domenichino and Agucchi in the 1610s’,
Source: Notes in the History of Art, 37.1–2
(Fall/Winter 2016), 81–91.
8. Bissell, Artemisia Gentileschi and the
Authority of Art, p. 6; Herwarth Röttgen,
Il Cavalier Giuseppe Cesari D’Arpino (Rome:
Ugo Bozzi, 2002), pp. 374–75, cat. nos
129–30.
9. Roger–Adolf d’Hulst and Marc Vandenven,
Rubens: The Old Testament, Corpus
Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, 3, trans. by
P. S. Falla (London: Harvey Miller, 1989),
pp. 200–02; Carel van Tuyll’s entry on
Sisto’s painting in The Age of Correggio and
the Carracci: Emilian Painting in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries (Washington
D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1986),
pp. 374–75, cat. no. 119.
10. Another, now in the National Gallery,
London was signed and dated 1616: for
both, see Gail Feigenbaum’s entries in
Ludovico Carracci, ed. by Andrea Emiliani
(Milan: Electa, 1993), pp. 116–17, 169–70,
cat. nos 54, 77.
11. For example, Ilya Veldman, ‘Lessons for
Ladies: a Selection of Sixteenth– and
Seventeenth–Century Dutch Prints’,
Simiolus, 16 (1986), 113–27; Yvonne
Bleyerveld, ‘Chaste, Obedient and
Devout: Biblical Women as Patterns of
Female Virtue in Netherlandish and
German Graphic Art, ca. 1500–1750’,
Simiolus, 28 (2000–01), 219–50.
12. DeGrazia Bohlin, Prints and Related
Drawings, p. 291, cat. no. 176.
13. She was ‘pulchram nimis’, educated in
Mosaic law (‘erudierunt filiam suam
secundum legem Moysi’) (Daniel 13.2–3),
and ‘delicata nimis, et pulchra specie’
(13.31).
14. DeGrazia Bohlin, Prints and Related
Drawings, p. 299, cat. no. 185.
15. Annibal Caro, Gli straccioni (Venice: Aldo II
Manuzio, 1589), pp. 26–27 (Act 1.4;
‘Vecchio lussurioso’ and ‘vecchiaccio
di Susanna’).
16. Anton Francesco Doni, La zucca (Lanciano:
Carabba Editore, 1914), p. 46 (‘un Vecchio
di Susanna’).
17. ‘Circumventa senum est technis
Susanna nepotum’.
18. For example, Margaret Miles, Carnal
Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious
Meaning in the Christian West (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 122–24; Nicole
Tilford, ‘Susannah and Her Interpreters’,
in Women’s Bible Commentary, rev. and
updated edn, ed. by Carol A. Newsom and
others (Louisville: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2012), p. 433.
19. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London/
BBC: Penguin, 1972), pp. 49–51 (including
Tintoretto’s Susanna and the Elders),
based on a television series first aired by
the BBC in 1972; Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16
(Autumn 1975), 6–18, often reprinted; the
quotation is from Tilford, ‘Susannah and
Her Interpreters’, pp. 433–34.
20. Stephan Füssel, The Bible in Pictures:
Illustrations from the Workshop of Lucas
Cranach (1534) (Hong Kong: Taschen,
2009), p. 26 (‘nützlich und gut’); Elizabeth
Philpot, Old Testament Apocryphal Images
in European Art (Gothenburg: University of
Gothenburg, 2009), pp. 87–88.
21. Henry Joseph Schroeder, Canons and
Decrees of the Council of Trent: Original
Text with English Translation (St Louis:
B. Herder, 1941), pp. 17–18, 296–97
(‘sacris et canonicis’).
22. Sixtus of Siena, Bibliotheca sancta ex
præcipuis Catholicæ Ecclesiæ auctoribus
collecta(Venice: apud Franciscum
Franciscium Senensem, 1566), pp. 10, 31,
427, 444–45, 667–69, 1019.
23. For more, see Kathryn Smith, ‘Inventing
Marital Chastity: The Iconography of
Susanna and the Elders in Early Christian
Art’, Oxford Art Journal, 16.1 (1993), 3–24.
24. N. Randolph Parks, ‘On the meaning of
Pinturicchio’s Sala dei santi’, Art History,
2 (1979), 291–317 (pp. 294–95).
25. Jerome is in Hieronymus Stridonensis,
Commentaria in Sophoniam, Patrologia
Latina, 25, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne
(Paris: Thibaut, 1845), col. 1366; cited
in Cornelius à Lapide, Commentaria in
Danielem Prophetam (Paris: Societatum
Minimam, 1622), p. 156; translated in
Jones, Altarpieces and Their Viewers, p. 40.
For Daniel as priest, see Lynn Staley,
‘Susanna’s Voice’, in Sacred and Profane in
Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature: Essays
in Honour of John V. Fleming, ed. by Robert

16. 56
Epstein and William Robins (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2010), p. 48.
26. St Augustine, Opera Omnia, Patrologia
Latina, 39, ed. by Jacques-Paul Migne
(Paris: Thibaut, 1865), col. 1508 (sermon
343.4); translated in St Augustine, Sermons
341–400 on Various Themes, ed. by John E.
Rotelle (Hyde Park NY: New City Press,
1995), p. 43.
27. Hippolytus, Scholia on Susanna, trans.
by Stewart D. F. Salmond, Ante-Nicene
Fathers, 5 (Buffalo: Christian Literature
Publishing, 1886), p. 192 (lines 7, 15,
19). For Susanna as the new Eve, see also
Betsy Halpern-Amaru, ‘The Journey of
Susanna Among the Church Fathers’, in
The Judgment of Susanna: Authority and
Witness, ed. by Ellen Spolsky (Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1996), p. 30.
28. Citing Mark Carter Leach, ‘Rubens’
Susanna and the Elders in Munich and
Some Early Copies’, Print Review, 5 (1976),
120–27, Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi:
The Image of the Female Hero, pp. 193–94
misreads the patristic and hence artistic
tradition to claim that the underlying
assumption is that ‘Susanna’s dilemma
was whether or not to give in to her
sexual instincts’ because she was erotically
tempted like Eve.
29. E. A. Wallis Budge, Coptic Homilies in the
Dialect of Upper Egypt (London: Trustees of
the British Museum, 1910), p. 196; Leach,
‘Rubens’ Susanna and the Elders’, p. 125
(also for Rubens’s brother).
30. Leach, ‘Rubens’ Susanna and the Elders’,
pp. 125, 126 n. 23.
31. The quoted phrases are from Garrard,
‘Artemisia and Susanna’, p. 148 and
Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi
around 1622 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001), pp. 80–81, which
on pp. 81–84 discusses ‘Susanna in the
Garden of Love’, but not the Song of
Songs, though the hortus conclusus and
Susanna’s Marian evocation are mentioned
in Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image
of the Female Hero, p. 187.
32. ‘Pomario viri sui’; ‘pomarius’ in vv. 4, 15,
26, 36, 38; the door is ‘ostia pomarii’ in vv.
18, 20, 25, 36.
33. ‘Schino’ (v. 54) and ‘prino’ (v. 58).
34. St Ambrose, Opera Omnia, Patrologia
Latina, 16, ed. by J. P. Migne (Paris:
Thibaut, 1845), cols 1142–43
(Epistola XLV, ‘Denique Susanna in
paradiso erat […] Ibi ergo est casta uxor,
ubi virgo’); St Ambrose, Letters, trans. by
Sister Mary Melchior Beyenka (New York:
Fathers of the Church, 1954), p. 130.
35. Menzio, Artemisia Gentileschi: Lettere
precedute da Atti di un processo per stupro,
pp. 19, 82; translated in Garrard, Artemisia
Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero,
pp. 416, 464.
36. Henri Leclercq, ‘Suzanne’, in Dictionnaire
d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, ed. by
Fernand Cabrol and Henri Leclercq
(Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1953), XV, pt.
2, col. 1745; Piero Boitani, ‘Susanna in
Excelsis’, in The Judgment of Susanna.
Authority and Witness, ed. by Ellen Spolsky
(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), p. 11.
37. Frères de Saint-Jean de Dieu, Ordo
commendationis animae […] ad usum
clericorum ministrantium infirmis (Bologna,
1612).
38. Schroeder, Canons and Decrees, pp. 216
(English), 484 (Latin).
39. Laurentius Surius (ed.), Conciliorum
omnium tum generalium […] (Cologne:
Calenius & Quentel, 1567), III, p. 177 (act
7).
40. Johannes Molanus, De picturis et
imaginibus sacris (Louvain: Hieronymus
Welleus, 1570), fols 32v–33r (ch. 11),
summarized in the Index as ‘Susannae
imago incontinentibus ostendebatur’;
Gabriele Paleotti, ‘Discorso intorno alle
imagini sacre e profane’, in Paola Barocchi
(ed.), Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento (Bari:
Laterza, 1960), II, p. 461, translated as
Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images,
trans. by William McCuaig (Los Angeles:
Getty Publications, 2012), p. 286. For
Susanna paired with Joseph see the two
paintings by Carlo Francesco Nuvolone of
c. 1635: Alberto Crispo, ‘Carlo Antonio e
l’eredità dei Procaccini’, Paragone, 49.639
(May 2003), p. 45–46, figs 46–47 and
color plate II.
41. Gregorio Comanini, Il Figino, Mantua:
Francesco Osanna, 1591, p. 138.
42. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte
(Milan: Paolo Gottardo Pontio, 1585),
p. 105 (2.1), trans. by Richard Haydocke
as A Tracte Containing the Arts of Curious
Paintinge (Oxford: Iosef Barnes for R. H,
1598), pp. 73–74.
43. Paleotti, ‘Discorso’, p. 501; in English,
Paleotti, Discourse, p. 313.
44. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in
Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion,
2nd
edn (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996).
45. The translation is from H. Diane Russell
with Bernardine Barnes, Eva/Ave. Woman
in Renaissance and Baroque Prints
(Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art,
1990), p. 57, cat. no. 18.
46. A connection rather than a contrast with
the crouching-Venus type in several works,
including Carracci’s, is drawn in Garrard,
Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the
Female Hero, pp. 194, 196.
47. In the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna:
Alessandro Marabottini, Jacopo di Chimenti
da Empoli (Rome: De Luca, 1988), pp. 72–
76, 199–201, cat. no. 40.
48. Lapide, Commentaria in Danielem, pp. 157–
58.
49. An alternative reading of the Burghley
House composition is given in Garrard,
Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622, p. 86:
‘her melting gaze [is] fixed upon’ the Elders
and ‘her eyes [are] saying yes’ to them.
50. In the Städel Museum, Frankfurt:
Sebastian Schütze and Thomas Willette,
Massimo Stanzione: L’opera completa
(Naples: Electa, 1992), pp. 194–95, cat. no.
A18, Pl. VI.
51. Schroeder, Canons and Decrees,
pp. 216, 484.
52. Schroeder, Canons and Decrees,
pp. 217, 485.
53. Diego Beggiao, La visita pastorale di
Clemente VIII (1592–1600) (Rome:
Libreria Editrice della Pontificia Università
Lateranense, 1978), p. 106; Alessandro
Zuccari, Arte e committenza nella Roma di
Caravaggio (Turin: Edizioni Rai, 1984),
pp. 16–17, 21–23.
54. Jones, Altarpieces and Their Viewers,
pp. 16–19, 46; Kimberly Dennis, ‘Camilla
Peretti, Sixtus V, and the Construction
of Peretti Family Identity in Counter-
Reformation Rome’, Sixteenth Century
Journal, 43 (2012), 71–101 (pp. 90–99).
55. For the Cistercian nuns as viewers see
Jones, Altarpieces and their Viewers,
pp. 49–51. However, some material used
by Jones to discuss seventeenth-century
viewing on pp. 62–65 because it is thought
new at the time was actually first written
and printed in the fifteenth century. For
the play of Susanna performed in Florence
around 1465 and published thirteen
times between 1500 and 1615 see Nerida
Newbigin (ed.), Nuovo Corpus di Sacre
Rappresentazioni fiorentine del Quattrocento
(Bologna: Commissione per i testi di
lingua, 1983), pp. 137–59; Alfredo Cioni,
Bibliografia delle Sacre rappresentazioni
(Florence: Sansoni, 1961), pp. 284–87.
An anonymous Italian poem published
around 1493–96 and reprinted several
times thereafter is instead treated as a
new publication of 1601, but see Amos
Parducci, ‘La istoria di Susanna e Daniello,
poemetto popolare italiano antico’,
Romania, 42 (1913), 34–75.
56. Harris, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi: The
Literate Illiterate’, pp. 113–14, argues
that the choice was not about rape or
sexual harassment, and that it was not a
‘feminist manifesto’ (p. 119). By focusing
on aesthetic principles and contemporary
precedents, she concludes that the 1610
painting is ‘a brilliant synthesis of Annibale
and Caravaggio’ (p. 115).
57. Menzio, Artemisia Gentileschi: Lettere
precedute da Atti di un processo per stupro,
p. 17 (‘ero zitella’, as stated in March
1612); trans. by Garrard, Artemisia
Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero,
p. 414 (‘I was a virgin’).
58. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image
of the Female Hero, p. 481; and for more
gossip see ibid., pp. 480–85, with a
synopsis of material not published in
Menzio.
59. Paleotti, ‘Discorso’, p. 497; Paleotti,
Discourse, p. 310 (2.52).
60. Paleotti, ‘Discorso’, p. 500; Paleotti,
Discourse, p. 313.
61. In the summer of 1611, chaperoned but
without her father, she visited several
major Roman churches for mass or
confession, and once with her father she

17. 57
saw work underway at the Quirinal Palace:
Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of
the Female Hero, pp. 18, 422–23, 492 n. 14.
62. Male models of Orazio’s are mentioned in
the trial: primarily a man in his seventies
posing for the figure of St Jerome and a
barber he had used for nearly twenty years.
By contrast, Artemisia produced studies
or portraits of two boys and a woman:
Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image
of the Female Hero, pp. 415 (‘putto’), 423
(‘figlio’), 463, 482, 483, 485.
63. Mann’s entry in Christiansen and Mann
(eds), Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi,
pp. 299–302, cat. no. 52.
64. See Bernardine Barnes, Michelangelo in
Print (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 21
for the Marcantonio Raimondi print,
B.XIV.4.2.
65. On the lack of access to the Sistine
chapel by women see Bernadine Barnes,
Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’: The
Renaissance Response (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998), pp. 41–45.
66. Mann, in Christiansen and Mann (eds),
Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, p. 298,
refers generically to ‘a print’. The actual
engraving is mentioned very briefly
in Harris, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi: The
Literate Illiterate’, p. 116, given to Ghisi.
67. Garrard, ‘Artemisia and Susanna’, fig. 11;
Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, fig. 167;
Bissell, Artemisia Gentileschi, fig. 9. On the
date see Carl Robert, Mythologische Cyklen,
Die antiken Sarkophag-Reliefs, 2 (Berlin:
Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1890),
pp. 168–71, cat. no. 155. Bissell, Artemisia
Gentileschi and the Authority of Art, pp. 5–6
proposes a derivation from a painting of
Diana and Actaeon by Cavalier d’Arpino,
but the extended hand is different and the
other one is lower.
68. For the example still in the Palazzo
Giustiniani, see Robert, Mythologische
Cyklen, pp. 171–73, cat. no. 156; Phyllis
Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein,
Renaissance Artists & Antique Sculpture:
A Handbook of Sources, 2nd
edn (London:
Harvey Miller, 2010), pp. 106–07, cat.
no. 106. For the Barberini relief, now in
the Vatican, see Robert, Mythologische
Cyklen, pp. 174–75, cat. no. 158; Bober and
Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists & Antique
Sculpture, p. 150. The provenance of the
third example, now in Madrid, is not clear:
Robert, Mythologische Cyklen, pp. 173–74,
cat. no. 157.
69. See Christiansen’s entry in Christiansen
and Mann (eds), Orazio and Artemisia
Gentileschi, pp. 79–82, cat. no. 12, which
points out that ‘antiquarianism played no
significant role in his art’.
70. The gestures are adjusted in her Brno
Susanna of 1649, where shadow masks the
junction at the neck.
71. Paleotti, ‘Discorso’, p. 215 (1.21, ‘dilettare,
insegnare e movere’); Paleotti,
Discourse, p. 111.
72. Bissell, Artemisia Gentileschi and the
Authority of Art, pp. 258–59, 264–67, 293;
Mann’s entries in Christiansen and Mann
(eds), Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi,
pp. 414, 416, 426.
73. Menzio, Artemisia Gentileschi: Lettere
precedute da Atti di un processo per stupro,
pp. 52, 107, translated in Garrard,
Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the
Female Hero, pp. 445, 479. If I am right,
this confirms that the Susanna was painted
before any sexual interaction began with
Tassi, either harassment or rape.
74. Corrado Ricci, Beatrice Cenci, 2 vols (Milan:
Fratelli Treves, 1923); Mario Bevilacqua
and Elisabetta Mori (eds), Beatrice
Cenci: la storia il mito (Rome: Viella and
Fondazione Marco Besso, 1999), including
Rossella Vodret, ‘Un volto per un mito,
il “ritratto di Beatrice” di Guido Reni’,
pp. 131–39, on the Bolognese painting
in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica,
Rome, with a legendary but mistaken
identification as a portrait of Cenci,
erroneously attributed to Reni but possibly
by Elisabetta Sirani or Ginevra Cantofoli.
75. Lapide, Commentaria in Danielem, p. 158,
translated in Jones, Altarpieces and
Their Viewers, p. 39.
76. Ricci, Beatrice Cenci, II, pp. 175, 181–83,
212–13. The site was perhaps chosen
because her confessor Fra Andrea
Belmonte was based there.
77. The drawing is in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York (acc.
no. 80.3.413). The resemblance of the
building in the fresco to the Tempietto
is noted by Jones, Altarpieces and
Their Viewers, p. 36 (and see fig. 1.16 for
the fresco), though no mention is made
of Cenci.
78. Bissell, Artemisia Gentileschi and the
Authority of Art, pp. 266–67 (c. 1636–38,
art market), 292–93, cat. no. 50 (the
canvas in Brno signed and dated 1649),
348–53, cat. no. X–42 (a canvas in
Burghley House signed and dated 1622),
387–89 nos L-102–05 (lost Susannas). On
the Burghley House and Brno examples
see also Mann’s entries in Christiansen
and Mann (eds), Orazio and Artemisia
Gentileschi, pp. 355–58, 424–26, cat.
nos 65, 83. On the rediscovery of a signed
Susanna with the date 1652 see Adelina
Modesti’s entry in Giampiero Cammarota
and others (eds), Guido Reni e il Seicento,
Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, 3
(Venice: Marsilio, 2008), pp. 502–03, cat.
no. 313.