Lucretia and Tarquin

Lucretia and Tarquin (1850) at the Musee Gustave Moreau takes one of the foundational subjects of Roman history painting — the rape of the noble Roman matron Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, which triggered the overthrow of the Roman kings and the founding of the Republic. The subject had been treated by Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, and many others, making it one of the most heavily encoded subjects in the Western tradition. Moreau's earliest treatment of this subject, made in 1850 when he was a young artist still under the influence of his teacher Picot, would have been measured against these precedents. The subject combined violence, female vulnerability, and political consequence in a way that made it perennially attractive to history painters. Moreau's later development of femme fatale imagery moves in the opposite direction — powerful women threatening men — but here the female figure is victim rather than agent.

An early Moreau canvas in the academic tradition would follow the compositional conventions of Salon history painting — dramatic diagonal opposition between the figures, strong chiaroscuro, classical anatomy. The richness that would characterize his later work is present in embryo.