The well known story is taken from the Old Testament Book of Daniel  and was popular throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the Venetians this was the opportunity to depict the female nude in a Biblical context.   In the north with Rembrandt, it was used as a vehicle to express the human emotion of embarrassment as the chaste Susanna is spied on by the lascivious old men.  Tintoretto painted this subject throughout his long career, each time with a variation of the composition and a change of emphasis in the emotions depicted.  The versions from the 1550s are considered to be those in the Louvre, Paris, the Prado, Madrid and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.   The example in the Washington National Gallery is considered to date from the 1570s and the currently untraced work, formerly in the collection of Marczel von Nemes, Munich, and later with F. A. Drey, London, is usually thought to have come from the late 1580s. The painting here has to be dated on stylistic grounds and the closest comparison can be made with the Vienna version of the subject.

‍