Loth and his daughters

Lucas van Leyden painted Lot and His Daughters around 1520, one of his forays into the ambiguous territory of Old Testament narrative where moral transgression could be treated as historical fact. The subject—Lot's daughters intoxicating their father and sleeping with him to preserve their lineage after the destruction of Sodom—had become an accepted theme in northern painting partly because of its moralizing potential and partly because it permitted the depiction of the female nude in a nominal religious context. Lucas's version, with its landscape setting and dramatic architectural ruins, demonstrates his mastery of both figure construction and spatial composition. The fire of Sodom in the distance provides a stark moral backdrop to the intimate scene in the foreground.

The panel demonstrates the artistic techniques characteristic of early sixteenth-century painting, with the careful rendering and color harmonies typical of the period's production.