Body Painting

Susanna and the Elders (1647) by Rembrandt van Rijn

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 of Susanna 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, twelve years after his first sketches of the motif around 1635. The painting process seems to have been laborious and accompanied by a dynamic exchange of ideas within the studio. Numerous drawings and sketches and an earlier painting hanging in Berlin testify to a continuous, exceptionally long preoccupation with the subject. In Susanna Harassed by the Elders (after 1636, attributed to his workshop) the naked back of Susanna, this time crouching and with unkempt hair, is so fair and bright it neutralizes her dark surroundings like a light source; an earlier Susanna (1636, now in Mauritshuis in The Hague) features a delicately cropped version of the scene as it appears in Berlin, with the nude woman isolated and facing the artist and viewer; the older men, well disguised and hardly recognizable, hide in the bushes.

But what was his true subject? As an artist and a workshop director, Rembrandt kept returning to the moment of undressing, of a woman preparing to bathe.

The later Bathsheba (1654, now in the Louvre Museum in Paris) and A Woman Bathing in a Stream (also 1654, now in the National Gallery in London) can be added to this accumulating, quite specific attempt. Different from depictions of bathing women as scopophilic imagery, Rembrandt seems more invested in capturing this instant of a woman’s exposing her nakedness, acknowledging the power relations in which the artist is also an observer interrupting a private moment. It is a moment in which shame, awareness, and temptation dissolve into each other.3 It is not a mere objectification of the woman by the Elders, the painter, and consequently the viewer; Rembrandt rather depicts a moment of interruption of a private circuit; a disruption of the woman’s presence to herself. The moment also exposes a disintegration; her split from herself is a fundamental one.4 Pieter Lastman’s Susanna and the Elders’s influence on Rembrandt’s composition is evident; both paintings hang at the Gemäldegalerie today. But while Lastman’s Susanna (1614) seems like a theatrical, high-resolution choreography within a naturalistic garden in which gazes seem aimed at nothing or nobody, Rembrandt’s fills its viewer with paralyzing terror. Shame and pity intertwine in viewing Susanna’s hopeless situation, trapped in a virile ambush as a tangible human presence made of paint.

The look in Susanna’s eyes may reveal a sense of intimacy between model and artist. It was most probably Hendrickje Stoffels modeling for Rembrandt as Susanna in his studio, assuming his late wife Saskia’s role. Often using the women who were most important in his personal life as models, Rembrandt was introducing interiority and privacy into a public space: the studio and the canvas. He was already a widower for six years by the time the painting was completed, following what in all accounts seemed to be not only a socially advantageous marriage but a loving relationship with Saskia. She had died when their only surviving son, Titus, was a baby. Twenty years the artist’s junior, Stoffels would soon become his mistress and later give birth to their daughter Cornelia, named after Rembrandt’s mother. The two openly lived together, but he never married her for the sake of his late wife’s inheritance. Stoffels would be candidly featured in several of Rembrandt’s later most distinctive depictions of women, specifically Bathsheba (1654). This possibly caused the Amsterdam Church Council to summon her the same year to answer a charge of “living in whoredom” with Rembrandt.

It is thus easy to imagine her identification with the harassed and exposed woman informing Susanna’s enduring expression in the painting. Stoffels was repeatedly hounded by Amsterdam church and courts, but remained by Rembrandt’s side until her death seven years before his, caring for him when his popularity among clients and dealers waned and he, bankrupted yet not unaware of his supremacy as a painter, became her and his son’s “employee” before the law. This kind of depiction of women evoked critical outrage even in Rembrandt’s lifetime. Why would he deliberately choose to represent vulgar peasant women instead of a Greek Venus? Andries Pels, a Dutch poet, wrote in 1681, “Pendulous breasts, distorted hands, even the marks of the corset laces over the belly, or the garter about the leg: all had to be shown if Nature was to have her due. He wouldn’t listen to rules or reasons of moderation in showing parts of the body.”5 Rembrandt’s “notions of the delicate forms of women would have frightened an Arctic bear,” the British author Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1838. Undoubtedly it is always a particular woman modeling for the artist in his studio. Rembrandt introduced to painting a female nude that is neither an ideal monument nor a source of voyeuristic pleasure, but rather incarnated through uncompromising naturalism that spares us no detail. His nudes are nevertheless affectionate and desiring, a contradictory condition ungraspable to several writers even today, even when defending Rembrandt’s portrayal of women. To this day, the very inclination of art-historical writers (for example Kenneth Clark, and later, Simon Schama) seems too infected with bias.6

Yet being the ultimate allegory, the female nude had been an infinitely fecund formative principle to masculine Western art in modern times, serving both the artist’s desire and his reflection on the conventions of painting. Corpulent and sublime, ideal and obscene, the female nude, from Rembrandt to Marcel Duchamp, is always also painting itself. As long as the history of Western art was dictated by men, the female nude also always served as a projection screen; a manifold allegorical body of painting.

On the canvas surface, the painted light dims as it moves away from the picture’s highlight, Susanna. The rest of the painting, considered to be one of Rembrandt’s masterpieces within the relatively rich collection at the Gemäldegalerie, is slightly smeared—a brown-green, grossly incomplete palace architecture and vegetation surrounding the garden pond. Although the painting, as it was acquired in 1883 by the Gemäldegalerie in...