Lucrèce

Lucretia stands in a golden dress, a dagger in one hand and a bed cord in the other, blood already seeping through her white shift. In one of his last history paintings, Rembrandt shows not a heroine's pose but the full weight of a woman's anguish.

The story behind the painting

Rembrandt painted Lucretia in 1666, a few years before his death, in oil on canvas, about 110.2 by 92.3 cm. The story comes from the Roman historian Livy. Lucretia, a noblewoman married to Lucius, was raped by Sextus, son of an Etruscan king, who threatened to kill her and frame her in a false affair if she resisted. The next day she sent for her father and her husband, told them what had happened, and stabbed herself. For the Romans she became a heroine of virtue. The subject was popular in the Baroque period, and Rembrandt was one of many Dutch artists who carried it through Northern Europe.

What to look for

Lucretia wears an ornate gold dress and pearl earrings, signs of her wealth. The dress is in disarray, showing her undergarment, which is stained with blood from the wound to her heart. In her right hand she holds the dagger; with her left she grips what appears to be a bed tassel. Rembrandt does not paint idealised beauty. Her skin is pale and her small lips speak of grief. Notice how she is lit as if by a spotlight against a dark background, a tenebrism that comes from Caravaggio's influence and pulls her toward the viewer, so that we meet her pain face to face.

Meaning and intent

Svetlana Alpers has linked the painting to Rembrandt's companion Hendrickje Stoffels. In 1663, when he painted her as Bathsheba, she had been censured by the Dutch Reformed Church for living with him unmarried after the birth of their daughter Cornelia. Rembrandt never married her, because a clause in his first wife Saskia's will threatened his income. Alpers suggests the painting may carry his guilt and the strain of his domestic life, and that he used Hendrickje's experience to explore the full humanity of a suffering woman. Sir Lawrence Gowing suggested another reading: that the figure is not Lucretia but Arria, a Roman heroine who stabbed herself to give her husband courage.

Legacy

Rembrandt had painted Lucretia two years earlier, in 1664, in a work now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, showing her before she stabs herself. In 2020 the art historian Jeremy Caniglia used X-rays, palette comparisons and overlays to argue that Rembrandt built this Lucretia as a feminised echo of Caravaggio's David, with a similarly tilted head, a figure ending below the waist, and a bed tassel in place of Goliath's head. After passing through collections in France, Poland, England and the United States, the painting was given to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where it has been since 1934.