Jacopo Bassano, The Adulteress
1536
Oil on canvas
Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa, Italy
The painting is a straightforward illustration of John 8:1-11. The men around the woman register various shades of surprise and shame as Jesus writes in the ground with his right index finger. The woman's bare head, blond hair, and décolletage emphasize her sexuality more than in other images of this episode.
The text has Jesus "sitting" in the Temple area and "bending down" to write in the earth. In many early works he bends from a throne-like chair, but Bassano does without a chair and has him kneeling on a tiled floor. The tiles are crucial to the painting's vanishing-point perspective, but presumably one would not be able to write on them with one's finger.
The man on the left with the wooden leg is not in John 8 nor in any other gospel account. His presence here must be intended either as a symbol of the moral disability of the woman's accusers or simply as the effort of a young artist of the Renaissance to explore new ways of representing bodies as they actually appear in lived life. (Bassano was 26 at the time.)
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Read more about images of the woman taken in adultery.
Photographed at the museum by Richard Stracke, shared under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.