The Legend of Cloelia

Guidoccio Cozzarelli's The Legend of Cloelia, painted around 1480 and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts an episode from Roman history celebrated by Livy — the young Roman hostage Cloelia who escaped from the Etruscan king Porsenna by swimming the Tiber, was sent back by the Romans in good faith, but was then released by Porsenna in admiration of her courage. Cloelia was one of the celebrated examples of Roman female virtue and courage that Renaissance humanists drew from Livy and other classical sources to construct ideals of civic virtue and heroic femininity.

Tempera on panel with the panoramic horizontal composition characteristic of Sienese secular narrative painting. The Tiber crossing is the compositional and narrative centerpiece, with Cloelia and the Roman hostage women shown swimming while Porsenna's camp appears on one bank and Rome on the other.