A young woman is about to step into the water. She directs her worried gaze at us while her naked body leans forward. Her fair skin glows in a ray of light, illuminating the right side ofSusanna and the Elders by Rembrandt van Rijn, an oil on panel painting. She has just doffed her opulent gown in warm reds, placed behind her with a pair of crimson slippers. The warmth of the ankles that have just left them is almost palpable. She is about to bathe, and her right foot, stable and fleshy, is already in the clear water. Her gaze makes us her witness as an elegantly dressed older man grabs the fabric barely cloaking her unguarded back with one hand; the other supports his wrinkled face. Another elder painted in less detail accompanies him; his bearded face is lit in a sealed expression as both sneak on a stony staircase behind their jolted, defenseless prey.
Conspiracy and libel lie at the core of the story told in the Book of Daniel of the virtuous young wife of a wealthy Babylonian Jew. Threatened with blackmail by two distinguished judges were she not to sleep with them, Susanna put her trust in God and refused their proposition. They defamed her, claiming she was meeting a lover at the bath. She was to be put to death for promiscuity when the young Daniel saved her.
The story was popular in a seventeenth-century Amsterdam that saw, as a result of Calvinist iconoclasm, the banishment of most art from churches, including religious-themed paintings. Such Biblical scenes were now painted to be shown in the domestic, secular sphere, where they were tolerated and in fact flourished.Susanna is imbued with a peculiar tension between spiritual passion and quotidian life that many of Rembrandt’s paintings, and others of the Dutch Golden Age, share as a result of this disposition.1 Nowhere in the biblical plot is there mention of bathing or physical assault, but like other biblical or mythological narrations with female protagonists, the theme had served as a qualified smokescreen for showing the (erotic) nude endorsed by virtue in art since the sixteenth century.
Prosperity presented a moral ambiguity that plagued the culture of the Netherlands, whose economy had emerged to dominate the world by the mid-seventeenth century. The country became a global empire. Its wealth and conspicuous consumption—of Ming porcelain, Lyon silk, Brazilian emeralds, Oriental spices, and other wordly treasures—merged with the restraints of Calvinist inhibition and shame.2 In fewer than one hundred years, the tiny nation with a population of less than two million had overcome a flood that almost drowned the low landscape, as well as an eighty-year war against Spain. It was with the consciousness of a chosen people whose residues are still evident today. How to be strong, yet pure? How to be rich, yet humble?
Rembrandt was forty-one years old when the painting was completed in 1647,
