Tintoretto’s Susannah and the Elders takes as its topic the Apocryphal tale of an honorable young Jewish matron sexually blackmailed by elderly public servants and saved from execution by Daniel’s literally divinely inspired interrogation . Tintoretto chooses the moment when Susannah’s lustful admirers try to spy on her while bathing, to encapsulate the longer story and showcase a stunning nude in a private moment. 1 With a cramped focus and high contrast in brightness, it is superbly effective at riveting the eye on the gleaming skin of the heroine and providing a sense of impending doom for the dutiful woman. The picture thus succeeds admirably at capturing the materiality of glowing fleshskin, water, silver, mirror, and greenery, while still being very clearly much an artificial construct of the studio and paintbrush, because the artist’s most urgent purpose is to explore and represent a magnificent woman’s figure. Although probably originally much brighter, the colors nonetheless seem muted. The natural items pictured; for example, vines, trees, and duck pond, exhibit the same color intensity and range as the bodies and bald head of the dirty-old-men magistrates. The only exceptions seem to be the glowing body of Susannah, and her “ornaments of display” 2 . This is a clear signal of the artifice of the artist, but it does not detract from the picture, because these elements of the setting merely set off and highlight the nude’s serene self-absorption. These muted background colors, combined with the nude’s brilliant paleness, focus attention on her. The lurking perverts are almost a second thought, concealed behind the fragile-seeming espaliered wall, and blending in, as they do, with the underbrush 3 . For the artist, they are less interesting than the central figure, and their lack of obtrusiveness both fits the narrative and helps attention to concentrate on Susannah. The clothing of the left-hand elder forms a pumpkin-colored mass, with a fungus-like bare pate thrusting out towards the viewer. This figure appears to be the ground to the left of the espaliered wall . 4 The figures and objects in the landscape are clearly delineated with both line and hue. The most striking example of this, apart from Susannah, is this mushroom-like elder’s cranium, outlined perhaps with a brush, to distinguish it from the background. Figuring out this background takes effort. Unlike in a Da Vinci, such as La Gioconda (or Mona Lisa ) wherein the landscape, although not always strictly realistic, is at least plausible, the background seems almost irrelevant. Susannah’s setting evokes, for modern viewers, simplified theatre-in-the-round sets: the vining plants espaliered onto the (notably skinny 5 ) wall are the only explic. It reference to an orchard sweltering in the full heat of summer, as the Biblical story indicates. However, her small supposedly private space is beautifully detailed, and this draws the eye to admire her body and to the intimate personal objects next to her feet. This is not the way space presents itself to the eye in the natural world, and is clearly showing the imprint of the artist, but it works to create a sort of tunnel vision on the naked beauty. The space in the painting seems very shallow, in spite of the vistas of garden and pond visible to the rear. The attention of the painter and of the viewer is