Miss Fane (sometimes known as 'Lucretia')

This portrait, known as 'Miss Fane' but sometimes titled 'Lucretia', sits at the intersection of portraiture and history painting that Guido Reni exploited throughout his career. The subject's direct gaze, the undone or loosened costume, and the possible identification as the Roman matron Lucretia — who stabbed herself after her assault by Tarquin — all suggest a work that uses a specific model for a generalizing tragic or heroic image. Reni was the leading painter of idealized female beauty in seventeenth-century Europe, and his heads of Beatrice Cenci, Lucretia, and similar subjects became among the most copied and engraved images of the Baroque era.

The face is rendered in Reni's distinctive pale, porcelain-smooth flesh tones, with the light source creating a soft modeling that avoids strong chiaroscuro in favor of an even, idealized illumination. The loosened drapery is painted rapidly in broad strokes of white and cream, providing a warm contrast to the cooler flesh of the face and throat.