![]() ![]() Each came with a companion, Spurius Lucretius with Publius Valerius and Collatinus with Lucius Iunius Brutus. However, after Tarquinius had left, she quickly sent to Rome for her father, Spurius Lucretius, and to Ardea for her husband, Collatinus. Faced with the prospect of utter shame for herself and her family, Lucretia finally submitted. When the woman refused to submit, Tarquinius further threatened to kill both her and a slave, whose body he would place in the bed alongside hers. Once the household was asleep, Tarquinius crept to Lucretia’s bedroom with his sword in hand, threatening Lucretia and confessing his passion for her. A few days later and unbeknown to Collatinus, he again travelled to Collatia, where he was graciously welcomed as a guest and given a room. Taken with her beauty and virtue and, perhaps, smarting a little from the comparison with his own wife’s behaviour, Sextus Tarquinius became consumed with sexual desire. They rode on to Collatia, where Lucretia was, on the other hand, discovered ‘still in the main hall of her home, bent over her spinning and surrounded by her maids as they worked by lamplight’. The party, by now the worse for drink, set out for Rome, to find Sextus Tarquinius’s wife and other royal princesses enjoying a banquet and disporting themselves frivolously. In the course of a drinking bout, the men began to debate whose wife was the most virtuous, Collatinus loudly proclaiming that his Lucretia would unquestionably win any such competition, but that they should test the matter for themselves by riding to visit their respective spouses. The group included Sextus Tarquinius, the son of the Roman king, and his kinsman Collatinus. The events recounted by Livy and subsequent authors took place in 509 B.C., when Roman troops were camped outside the city of Ardea during a siege. 3 From the late fifteenth century, Italian translations of Livy’s history of Rome began to appear, notably an influential edition with woodcut illustrations in Venice in 1493. 2 The Italian retellings of Lucretia’s story were derived from earlier Latin texts, including Ovid and, in particular, the account given by Livy in his History of Rome (Book I, chapters 57–9). Lucretia was one of a group of mythological and historical women who were regarded as exemplars of nobility and female virtue and whose stories were recounted in literature, especially Boccaccio’s tremendously popular De mulieribus claribus, 1 and in art. The story of the noble Roman woman Lucretia, her rape and the subsequent redemption of her honour through suicide was immensely popular in Italy and elsewhere in Europe during the Renaissance period. Some areas that would not have been particularly visible have been left unworked – for example, the back parts of Lucretia’s head, or the father’s left thumb. ![]() Other than the loss of the top section, the relief is overall in very good condition, with just some minor losses, such as Spurius Lucretius’s left toes, and the fingers of Lucretia’s left hand. Lucretia originally held a small dagger, the hilt of which, now lost, was probably made of metal, inserted into a small hole in her right hand. Holes on the top edge of the relief seem to confirm that there was originally a separately carved top section, which would have completed the arches. Behind the figures are three columns, the one on the left fluted, the others plain, and the beginnings of arches. The figures stand upon a small integral base, curved at the left and right edges, with Lucretius’s left foot projecting over it. She is flanked on her left by an elderly man, presumably her father, Spurius Lucretius, and on her right by a young woman, probably her maidservant, who appears to cry out. The sculpture depicts the Roman heroine Lucretia as she commits suicide by plunging a dagger into her stomach below her right breast, following her violent rape by Sextus Tarquinius. Previously entirely unknown to scholars, its appearance on the art market in 2020 was one of the most important art-historical discoveries of recent years. This beautiful and refined relief is a masterpiece of Italian Renaissance sculpture. Sale, Christie’s, London, 29 July 2020, lot 15 ![]() Private collection, Europe, since the 1950s ![]()
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