Download Lucretia Stories

Lucretia Story
The Tragedy of Lucretia, ca. 1500-1501
By Sandro Botticelli (1445 – 1510)
Oil on Panel
83.8 x 176.8 cm (33 x 69 5/8 in)
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
In the late fifteenth century it became fashionable among the highest circles of Florentine society to celebrate
marriages by commissioning not only furniture but also painted decorations filling the walls of an entire
room.
The Tragedy of Lucretia was a favorite subject of Renaissance painters and their patrons who admired it as a
grand and tragic paradigm of the virtue of Chastity, a subject self-evidently appropriate for decorations
commissioned in celebration of a wedding.
The Tragedy of Lucretia is a story from ancient Rome. As told by Livy, Valerius Maximus, and Ovid, the
tale goes that while her husband is away, the virtuous Lucretia is raped at knifepoint (shown in the scene at
the left of the Gardner Panel) by Sextus Tarquinius, an Etruscan prince, and son of King Tarqunius the
Proud, the tyrannical King of Rome.
The story starts out with Lucretia’s husband Collatinus, who is away on a military campaign on behalf of the
ruling yet despotic King Tarquinius of Rome. Collatinus is invited into the tent of the King’s son Sextus
where a drunken party is going on. Depite the fact that Collatinus’s friend Brutus advises against entering
the tent, Collatinus goes anyway. Inside are a bunch of men sitting around discussing the general infidelity
of their wives and sweethearts back in Rome. They bitterly complain that this is always the way things go
when men are away at war. Collatinus disagrees, bragging that his wife, Lucretia is utterly pure and
faithful—the most virtuous in all of Rome. So the men decide to settle the question by returning to Rome to
check up on the women.
Lucretia is visited by her husband (accompanied by Sextus Tarquinius.) She is indeed virtuously sewing and
working. Collatinus then returns to the battlefield. The prince, Tarquinius Superbus (Sextus), however, has
taken a jealous fancy to Lucretia. Sextus sneaks back to Lucretia’s home, seeking to erase the distinction of
his officer Collatinus (whereby Collatinus' wife Lucretia is the only faithful wife in Rome.)
Thus Sextus tries to seduce Lucretia. When Lucretia refuses, he threatens her, forcing her to comply (at
knifepoint) by saying that if she does not, he will parade her naked in public with a slave, accusing them of
adultery. For the ancient Romans, a woman who was raped was guilty of adultery, a crime punishable by
death, even though she had not given herself willingly.
Rather than allow this humiliation to befall her husband, the Roman noblewoman Lucretia instead plunges a
knife into her breast as her husband, her father, and a man named Junius Brutus look on in horror (Gardner
panel on the right.) In order to save her honor Lucretia has taken her own life, but not before revealing the
reason of the suicide in a letter to her father and husband.
Enraged by her death, Junius Brutus gave an oath to avenge her death (Gardner center panel) and led a
victorious rebellion against the Etruscan king, freeing the Romans from Etruscan rule. The fall of the king's
power over Rome marked the beginning of the Roman Republic.