Tarquinius und Lucretia

Tarquinius and Lucretia, painted around 1750 and now at the Schaezlerpalais in Augsburg, depicts the rape of Lucretia by the Etruscan prince Tarquinius — the episode that according to Roman legend provoked the overthrow of the monarchy and the founding of the Republic in 509 BC. The subject combined sexual violence, heroic female virtue, and political consequence in a narrative that European painters from Titian through Rembrandt had found irresistible. Tiepolo brings Venetian luminosity to the violent confrontation, placing the figures in a richly appointed interior that frames the drama with the physical evidence of aristocratic wealth. The Schaezlerpalais in Augsburg — an eighteenth-century rococo palace built by a banking family — holds this work in a setting contemporary with the painting itself, one of the few cases where a Tiepolo remains in an architecturally compatible environment.

Executed with airy compositions and attention to dramatic foreshortening, the work reveals Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's characteristic approach to composition and surface. The treatment of light and the careful modulation of color create visual richness within a unified pictorial scheme.