the-scryptory:April 6th prompt… I’ll take this as a nonfiction writing prompt!This is a fascinating

the-scryptory:April 6th prompt… I’ll take this as a nonfiction writing prompt!This is a fascinating photoshopped detail from “Susanna and the Elders” by Pierre van Hanselaer (1820). Here is the original painting:“Susanna and the Elders” is a story from the Biblical Apocrypha (in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, it appears in the Book of Daniel as Daniel chapter 13). Protestants and Jews consider it “apocryphal”–basically, a biblical fanfiction that teaches good lessons but isn’t a true story.As the story goes, a fair Hebrew wife named Susanna was falsely accused by lecherous voyeurs. As she bathes in her garden, having sent her attendants away, two lustful elders secretly observe the lovely Susanna. When she makes her way back to her house, they accost her, threatening to claim that she was meeting a young man in the garden unless she agrees to have sex with them.She refuses to be blackmailed and is arrested and about to be put to death for promiscuity when the young Daniel interrupts the proceedings, shouting that the elders should be questioned to prevent the death of an innocent. After being separated, the two men are cross-examined about details of what they saw but disagree about the tree under which Susanna supposedly met her lover. The two different elders say she was under, variously, as mastic tree, and an evergreen oak tree. The great difference in size between a mastic and an oak makes the elders’ lie plain to all the observers. The false accusers are put to death, and virtue triumphs.For a story that’s about defending women from rape and slut-shaming lies (which were literally deadly in that culture), the story of Susanna sure has been popular among male European artists, and for ALL the wrong reasons: it was a popular subject because it was a Biblical story that still allowed them to paint a naked woman, thus making them and the viewers into voyeurs like the elders. An example of this is the particularly infuriating “Susanna and the Elders” by Alessandro Allori (1561). Far from distressed, Allori’s Susanna looks positively delighted at the male attention. This is a male wet-dream overlaid on a story of men’s despicable sexual attacks on women:^Alessandro Allori, 1561A particularly revealing (ha ha) inversion of the trope was by Kathleen Gilje. She painted an alternative version of “Susanna and the Elders” by Artemisia Gentileschi, a rare famous female painter. Here is Gentileschi’s original painting, one of the few paintings on the theme of Susanna showing the sexual accosting by the two Elders as a traumatic event:^Artemisia Gentileschi, 1610Not long after Gentileschi painted this, she was raped by artist Agostino Tassi. Perhaps because of this, artist Kathleen Gilje chose to use Gentileschi’s painting as a way to comment on the violence of rape in real life as opposed to its male-gaze inversions in art. She painted her own version of Gentileschi’s work in lead paint, overpainted it with a copy of Gentileschi’s, then x-rayed the whole in order to show the two interpretations side-by-side:^“Susanna and the Elders Restored” by Kathleen Gilje, x-ray, 1998The image at the top of this post, showing a woman with an angry dog, can be seen as doing the same: someone has taken van Hanselaer’s distressed but helpless Susanna and added a nonhuman defender. Is this Susanna’s own fight instinct? Is it depicted as animalistic because the fight instinct is automatic, emotional, evolutionary (and thus might be seen as less intellectual, human, refined, and feminine than the prescribed role of women)? Is it the protective instinct of the viewer/artist, wanting to defend Susanna from her attackers? In any case, like Gilje’s x-rayed painting, this photoshopped detail makes visible the angry, fearful, violent ramifications of the subject matter, ramifications that have been too often literally painted over in male-centric western art. -- source link
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