This stately home is so venerable, it makes other great piles such as Blenheim Palace or Chatsworth look nouveau riche. Burghley House was built by Elizabeth I’s chief adviser William Cecil in the Renaissance. His descendants created a stupendous art collection and one of them, on his Grand Tour, happened to buy Artemisia Gentileschi’s 1622 masterpiece Susanna and the Elders from Rome’s Barberini Palace.
It is the kind of painting you should make a pilgrimage to see. This is Gentileschi’s second interpretation of the biblical story of Susanna, which she had depicted in her very first painting when she was just 17. Here, at the age of 29, with a lot of suffering and success behind her, she takes it on again with new painterly refinement. Dark blue skies and splashy green water, fleshy faces and glimpses of sculpture show her experimenting with a velvety style reminiscent of Veronese and Annibale Carracci. But there’s a punch. As Susanna tries to bathe, she’s spied on by two creepy blokes who don’t even bother to hide in the bushes: they leer openly, intimately, with the younger one making an obscene gesture with his finger.
