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| Albrecht Altdorfer Susanna and the Elders 1529 oil on panel Alte Pinakothek, Munich |
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| Annibale Carracci Susanna and the Elders ca. 1590-92 etching and engraving Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich |
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| Sisto Badalocchio Susanna and the Elders ca. 1602-1610 oil on canvas John and Mable Ringling Museum, Sarasota |
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| Peter Paul Rubens Susanna and the Elders ca. 1602 oil on canvas (painted in Rome) Galleria Borghese, Rome |
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| Annibale Carracci Susanna and the Elders 1604 oil on panel Palazzo Doria Pamphilij, Rome |
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| Joachim Wtewael Susanna and the Elders ca. 1605 oil on canvas Museum Gouda |
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| attributed to Pier Francesco Mazzucchelli (il Morazzone) Susanna and the Elders ca. 1610 oil on panel Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux |
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| Hendrick de Clerck Susanna and the Elders ca. 1620-30 oil on panel Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Anthony van Dyck Susanna and the Elders ca. 1622-23 oil on canvas Alte Pinakothek, Munich |
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| Massimo Stanzione Susanna and the Elders ca. 1630-35 oil on canvas Städel Museum, Frankfurt |
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| Rembrandt Susanna 1636 oil on panel Mauritshuis, The Hague |
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| Gerrit van Honthorst Susanna and the Elders 1655 oil on canvas Galleria Borghese, Rome |
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| Johann Michael Rottmayr Susanna and the Elders ca. 1692 oil on canvas Belvedere Museum, Vienna |
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| Anonymous French Artist Susanna and the Elders ca. 1710 oil on canvas Musée d'Évreux |
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| Jean-François de Troy Susanna and the Elders 1727 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen |
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| Reinhold Begas Susanna 1870-72 marble Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
There are few aspects of the past that are more difficult for us to grasp and recapture than the old experience of schooling. The harshness and even cruelty of the demands it made on the young apprentice would certainly revolt us. Just as the young singer lived in the house of his master and learned and practiced scales for many years under his constant supervision, so the painter's apprentice was delivered into the power of his taskmaster, who saw to it that he spent hours in the exercise of copying the works of the great. "Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time," wrote the aged Michelangelo on a sheet of paper to urge a flagging apprentice on, and these words must have been echoed in workshops all over Europe. The aim of these exercises was clearly formulated in a seventeenth-century treatise by the German painter Joachim von Sandrart: "When our Understanding issues its well-conceived concepts, and the hand, practised by many years of industrious drawing, puts them to paper according to reason, the perfect excellence of both the master and his art becomes manifest."
No one doubted in these days that all art was "conceptual" in the sense that you had first to learn and practice how to draw "a man" before you were even allowed to try your hand in the life class. In the academies there was a carefully graded course from the copying of prints to the drawing after the antique that took years before the artist was permitted to wrestle with a real motif. It is this insistence on the mastery of tradition that secured the continuity of art between the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, for all the time the sway of the pattern was unchallenged. Of course the material for copying had immeasurably increased with the coming of prints and the distribution of plaster casts. Moreover, it was supplemented by anatomy books and books on proportion, not to speak of the study of the nude in which the artist put his acquired knowledge to the test.
– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)