Susanna, wife of the wealthy Joakim, is bathing alone in her garden, having sent her attendants away, when two elders who frequent the household and serve as judges secretly watch her and then confront her, threatening to accuse her publicly of meeting a young man unless she agrees to have sex with them^[4]. Susanna refuses. The elders bring their false charge, and she is sentenced to death, only for God to inspire the young Daniel to intervene: he questions the two men separately, exposes contradictions in their accounts, and secures Susanna's acquittal and the elders' execution^[4]. The story had circulated in art since the early Christian era, originally as a tale in praise of Daniel's judgement, but by the Renaissance most painters had shifted its emphasis toward the erotic spectacle of the bathing scene itself, a shift Tintoretto's version of the mid-1550s exemplifies^[4].

Gentileschi's Susanna departs from that tradition. Rather than presenting Susanna as available to the viewer's gaze in the manner of Tintoretto or her later contemporaries, Ludovico Carracci and Anthony van Dyck among them, Gentileschi paints her shielding her body and turning away, her hands raised in a gesture of refusal rather than display^[2]. The two elders lean over the stone ledge that should separate them from her, one nearly reaching for her hair, closing the distance the composition otherwise establishes between predator and victim^[2]. Critics have described the effect as filling the viewer with genuine discomfort rather than pleasure, a reading of the subject from the position of the woman being threatened rather than the men doing the threatening^[2].

Gentileschi learned to paint in the Roman studio of her father, Orazio Gentileschi, grinding pigments and copying his Caravaggist compositions from an early age, after her mother died when Artemisia was twelve and left her the eldest of four children^[2]. As a woman she was barred from the life-drawing academies open to male students and could not move freely around the city to study its churches and monuments, restrictions that closed off the standard route to painting the large-scale, multi-figure biblical and historical scenes considered the most prestigious genre of the day^[2]. Susanna and the Elders shows how thoroughly she absorbed an alternative training regardless: the naturalism of Caravaggio's followers combined with the more classical figure language of Annibale Carracci and the Bolognese school her father also drew on^[1].