Lucretia

Rembrandt painted Lucretia twice in the mid-1660s — the first version is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1664), this second in the Minneapolis Institute of Art (1666) — returning to one of classical antiquity's most potent stories of female virtue and political violence. The Roman matron Lucretia, raped by Tarquin and taking her own life to preserve family honor rather than live in dishonor, was a subject with a long tradition in European painting stretching from Cranach to Titian to Guido Reni. Rembrandt's treatment makes no concession to the decorative nudity or heroic posturing of earlier versions: his Lucretia is clothed, upright, and devastated, the dagger held to her chest in a gesture that reads simultaneously as violence and prayer. The expression — a kind of wounded dignity, the face neither theatrical nor collapsed — gives the painting an emotional authenticity that all the technically more accomplished Italian versions lack. The Minneapolis Institute of Art acquired the painting in the twentieth century as part of its sustained commitment to building a collection of European masterworks accessible to a Midwestern public.

Rembrandt renders Lucretia's dying moment with devastating simplicity—the bloodstained chemise, the failing grip on the curtain pull, the expression of pain beyond tears. The restricted palette and broad, expressive brushwork concentrate all emotional force on the figure.