Susanna and the Elders in the Garden, and the Trial of Susanna before the Elders

Master of Apollo and Daphne · c. 1500

Medium

Tempera on panel

Original size

64 × 159 cm (25 1/4 × 62 5/8 in.); Framed: 76.4 × 188 cm (30 × 74 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

This intimate panel unfolds two moments of Susanna's ordeal simultaneously — her ambush in the garden and her public trial — within a single, elegantly composed scene that rewards slow looking. The anonymous Florentine painter known as the Master of Apollo and Daphne worked in the final decades of the fifteenth century, a period when Italian workshops were refining tempera's capacity for jewel-like colour and precise line. His figures have the crisp, almost sculptural clarity typical of the Florentine quattrocento, and his use of continuous narrative — placing sequential story moments within one unified setting — reflects a storytelling convention then giving way to the single-scene drama of the High Renaissance. The result feels both archaic and remarkably alive. The Art Institute of Chicago dates the work to around 1500, placing it precisely at that hinge point between medieval pictorial logic and Renaissance spatial naturalism — a tension visible in the painting's compressed garden space and stiffly dignified figures. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the panel's warm ochres, deep crimsons, and cool blue drapery into a medium that brings added depth and luminosity while preserving the careful linearity that defines the original's distinctive character.