Daniel Saving Susanna, the Judgment of Daniel, and the Execution of the Elders

Master of Apollo and Daphne · c. 1500

Medium

Tempera on panel

Original size

63.7 × 157.8 cm (25 1/8 × 62 1/8 in.); Framed: 78.7 × 189.9 cm (31 × 74 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

This intricate panel painting unfolds the complete arc of Susanna's story — her false accusation, Daniel's intervention, and the elders' punishment — across a single richly detailed composition that reads like a moral argument made visible. The Master of Apollo and Daphne is an anonymous Florentine painter active around 1490–1510, named by art historians after two surviving panels rather than any documented biography. Working in tempera on panel at a moment when oil paint was beginning to reshape Italian practice, he maintained the crisp, jewel-like precision associated with the earlier quattrocento tradition. His figures are graceful but grounded, set within architectural spaces that lend the narrative a sense of civic order and consequence. The painting belongs to a tradition of depicting the Susanna story as both a devotional and a legal exemplar — a warning against false witness that resonated deeply with Renaissance Florentine audiences attuned to questions of justice and public virtue. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates the panel's layered storytelling and formal clarity into a medium well-suited to its warmth and depth, allowing the scene's interplay of architecture, crowd, and moral drama to read with the same deliberate calm the original has held for over five centuries.