Emulsion and acrylic on OASIS acrylic sweetheart vase 18 X 11cm 2021

60 Marilyn and the elders

The apocryphal tale is as old as time. The perverted Babylonian elders proposition the married Susanna for sexual favors, threatening her virtuous reputation by blackmail. She refuses, preferring punishment to rape. Her honor and her life are ultimately saved by divine intervention. The narrative might be read through the lens of #MeToo and long-running themes of female rage, but in art, her loathsome and frightening predicament is almost always treated as pure voyeuristic pleasure.

Whatever indignation pious viewers might feel on her behalf is meant to be subjugated to the erotic desire her normally idealized nude body inspires. What an incredible ethical contortion. A viewer can understand the actions of the leathery old bags to be wicked yet still be complicit in their game with their unwavering gaze.

Art history is filled with such indignities masqueraded as high-minded porn. Sometimes it can be hard to face. Then again, it’s the little things that count when you can’t change the chauvinist past. There’s one detail in this particular painting of the story that strikes me as redeeming in that it treats Susanna honestly. She is beautiful and damned, but she is authentic.

Is Susanna in the middle of slipping her shoes off or is she hurrying to put them back on? It’s all happened so fast—the privacy and diversion of her bath time, of her very life, is ruined in an instant. So fast, in fact, that the impressions from her stockings remain etched into her calves.

There. That’s it. The truth: Those simple shadows in her incandescent, spot-lit, exposed flesh. Rembrandt, in all his tragic romance, regarded these things. The emotional and physical verity of his work stems from his obsessive observations of his own surroundings as well as his vulnerability with his personal relationships—friends, wives, lovers, and children.

Susanna Tattoo Photographer’s Gallery 2023

The Lothair Crystal AD 855-869 British Museum

An engraved ROCK CRYSTAL tells the story of Susana and the Elders in which Susanna is accused of adultery before being found innocent by the prophet Daniel.