Art: The Renaissance's Big Men on Canvas
Kunsthistoriches Museum, Gemaldegalerie, Vienna
Tintoretto, Susannah and the Elders, c. 1555-56
At around the same time that Titian executed his Venus, Tintoretto turned a story from the Old Testament into an intricate exercise in erotic surveillance. The old men at top and lower left corner attempt to catch a full frontal view of the naked Susannah, who thwarts them with the deft positioning of her arms and leg. She offers part of that view to us, however. But only the mirror holds the full view which it leaves to our imagination.
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