The Rape of Lucretia

Painted around 1680, The Rape of Lucretia at the Dayton Art Institute is an early work by Sebastiano Ricci, painted when he was approximately twenty years old and still working in the energetic naturalist tradition of late seventeenth-century northern Italy. The subject — the Roman noblewoman Lucretia's assault by Sextus Tarquinius and her subsequent suicide, which according to Livy triggered the expulsion of the Tarquin kings and the founding of the Republic — combined dramatic violence with a meditation on female honor and political consequence. Ricci's treatment at this early date shows his encounter with Venetian colorism and his engagement with the charged figural dynamics that Baroque painters from Guido Reni to Artemisia Gentileschi had brought to scenes of violated virtue. The Dayton acquisition places this early work in an American collection that pursued European Baroque seriously during the mid-twentieth century.

Early Ricci paintings show the influence of his Venetian and Bolognese training in their warm chiaroscuro and figural energy, before his mature style fully absorbed the lightness of the emerging Rococo. The assault scene demands expressive urgency, achieved through diagonal composition and the contrast between the aggressor's movement and Lucretia's resistance or passivity depending on the narrative moment chosen.