Signature and year lower left. At the back XXIII Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d'Arte - Venezia, 1942, label. Publication: Gregor sciltian by Marziano Berbardi, Ulrico Hoepli Editor, Milan,1946. XXIII Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d'arte: cataloo, II edition, Venice, 1942, p.96. Provenance: Umberto Baracchi Collection, Milan: Private Collection, Rome. Stefano Sbarbaro authenticity certificate.
"Susanna e i Vecchioni is a historical work by Gregorio Sciltian made in 1939. The painting is included in the Opera Omnia published by Hoepli in 1986 (after the artist's death), both as a minimalist in the catalog of works (106) and reproduced in full-page black and white at plate 32. It was exhibited in various exhibitions that marked the rise and first successes of the artist who, starting from 1933, found a certain importance in collecting in the city of Milan. The work was presented for the first time at the Galleria Gian Ferrari in Milan in 1939 and the following year at the Lyceum in Florence, but the locations in 1942 at the Galleria il Milione in Milan and above all at the 25th Venice Biennale were certainly even more important. That year was particularly important in the artist's career because an article by Ugo Ojetti on February 25 that appeared in the Corriere della Sera revealed him to the general public, making him a highly successful artist coveted by major collectors. The work is also published in the precious 1944 publication by Ulrico Hoepli entitled Sciltian, with a surreal story by Giovanni Comisso.
The work belongs to a very fruitful phase of the artist who in those years created some of his best works starting with the Bacchus in Osteria kept at the GNAM in Rome, a monumental canvas in which Sciltian continues in his intent to update Caravaggio's iconography. Susanna and the Elders also belongs to this trend which greatly characterized the artist's production who distinguished himself in that decade precisely for these unique interpretations of subjects drawn from the Baroque pictorial tradition. In this case, Sciltian chooses a biblical subject particularly dear to seventeenth-century painting (even if already examined in the previous century), an episode narrated in chapter XII of the book of the prophet Daniel. The story concerns the interests of two elderly people towards the beautiful and chaste Susanna. Guests of the house of a rich Jewish man, seeing the young woman while taking a bath, are fascinated to the point of threatening, in the event that she was not allowed to them, to reveal to her husband that he had surprised her with another man thus accusing her of a false betrayal. Susanna does not give in to their threats and the affair ends in court with the woman accused of adultery, a very serious crime punishable by capital punishment. It will only be the providential intervention of the prophet Daniel to save her from the death sentence.
Over the course of the history of art, iconography has inspired great artists such as Lorenzo Lotto, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese but it is above all in the Baroque era that the subject spread thanks to the tests of Rubens, de Ribera, Guido Reni, Rembrandt but it is usual associate him, in the terms in which he intertwines with his dramatic biographical events, above all with the figure of Artemisia Gentileschi who returns to this event in at least three different tests.
Sciltian updates the scene by bringing it into a dressing room of a modern theater, we can also guess from the poster partially visible in the background. The two elders burst into it surprising Susanna topless as she is intent on changing after a performance. One of them carries a bouquet of flowers with him and leans out the door to look at the beautiful Susanna while the other still remains on the threshold. The woman has a reaction of embarrassment and fear upon their arrival, we intuit that it is a dancer with the typical shoes placed in the foreground on a suitcase. Sciltian focuses on various details that contribute to the narration of the scene, such as the tricks placed on the table on which a mirror is placed, the red-enameled nails, the wedding ring on the left hand, the screen in the background with three doors on which a light with a clearly Caravaggesque cut.
The Thirties will be a fruitful and inspiring period for the painter who was able to gain the attention of an increasingly high-ranking collector. His first successes as a portraitist of the Milanese high aristocracy began in the 1940s. The market decreed the Russian painter a resounding success, his trompe l'oeil and his still lifes were highly sought after by collectors starting from those difficult years at the end of the conflict but Sciltian continued to be a highly sought after and fashionable painter too. in the years of the economic boom. Much rarer are these subjects in which re-enactments of iconographies drawn from the pictorial tradition intertwine with the need for their transposition to the present day by placing them in the flow of everyday life as if to transform them into a modern and unsettling genre painting. "