We know the tragic story of Lucretia from the Roman author Titus Livius. According to his story, Lucretia was the wife of Collatinus in the late sixth century B.C. She was raped by Sextus Tarquinius, the son of the seventh and last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus. Her assailant threatened her with murder, and told her that he would make it known that she had been unfaithful to her husband. This act of violence had far-reaching consequences for Rome, as the revenge enacted by Lucretia’s family led to the fall of the king and the foundation of the new Roman republic.

According to the legend, after the rape Lucretia called on her husband and her father and told them of the despicable deed done by the king’s son. They both declared that she was “innocent", but Lucretia nonetheless took her own life with a dagger. A patriarchal narrative of exoneration interpreted her suicide as restoring her “female honour”. Thereafter Lucretia came to be seen as a paradigm of wifely virtue.

Lucas Cranach, after Albrecht Dürer probably the most successful German artist in the first half of the sixteenth century, painted Lucretia with a dagger as her attribute many times. There are over forty surviving versions of this motif by Cranach. We might find this theme from antiquity questionable today, but it was clearly very popular in the early modern age, when an art market for private collections was first established. The figure of Lucretia gave the artist an opportunity to paint nudes. We can sense a life study here, but Cranach clearly was less interested in anatomical accuracy than in an aesthetically attractive image. In this small painting, Cranach demonstrates his expertise with the gracious poise of the female nude with its clear contours before a black background.