Most commonly, art depicted either the moment of the rape, or Lucretia is shown alone at the moment of her suicide.^[6] In this near life-size late version, which Titian said in a letter of 1568 (three years before it was completed) was "an invention involving greater labour and artifice than anything, perhaps, that I have produced for many years",^[7] the drama of the composition is heightened by small touches in pure white at the tip of the dagger and in Tarquin and Lucretia's eyes.^[8]

The head and hand entering from the left belong to a male slave; in Livy's telling Tarquin told Lucretia that if she did not yield to him, he would kill both Lucretia and the slave and then claim to have caught them during the act of adultery. The violent attack is closer to Ovid's account of the story, and although this is the only painting of a historical subject from Titian's last years, his mythological subjects are also all covered by Ovid. Lucretia wears her jewellery to bed, and Tarquin's clothes are modern and rich. Titian's signature is on the slipper at lower right. The painting has been trimmed on all sides, but it is not known when or by how much.^[9]

The subject was one of a group showing women from legend or the Bible who were powerless, or only able to escape their situation through suicide, such as Susanna, Dido of Carthage and Verginia.^[10] These formed a counterpoint to, or sub-group of, the set of subjects known as the Power of Women, showing female violence against, or domination of, men. These were often depicted by the same artists, and especially popular in Northern Renaissance art. The story of Esther lay somewhere between these two extremes.^[11]

Either Titian or, as is now thought more likely, his brother Francesco Vecellio (c. 1490–1559/60), had already painted the suicide, as "an elegant dance movement in a landscape", some 50 years earlier (now Royal Collection).^[12] Titian, or perhaps Palma Vecchio, had also painted a typical portrait of Lucretia holding a knife, but with the untypical addition of a male figure in deep shadow, either Tarquin or her husband, standing just behind her. This comes from 1514–15 and is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, with an early copy in the Royal Collection.^[13]

Titian's new composition can be shown to have been influenced by Northern prints, and was itself immediately popularized by an engraving by Cornelius Cort, dated 1571, which is "evidently from some authorized modeletto". This reversed the composition (in a mirror image, as print copies naturally do) but another print published in Rome, presumably pirated, copied the print and so reversed the composition again to restore the original.^[14] The exact poses of the individual figures also have precedents, with Lucretia perhaps drawing from the female figure (Dirce) in the famous Roman sculpture known as the Farnese Bull.^[15]

The composition evolved as Titian worked on it, as is shown by x-rays of the painting,^[16] and a workshop copy now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux (illustrated here), which reflects an earlier composition where the hand with the dagger is much lower, and threatening to thrust upwards not down. Here Lucretia's head is also turned away from Tarquin. The x-rays of the Cambridge painting show that the lower position of the arm had been tried there.^[17] There is an unfinished version, or study, with the raised hand but many other differences, now in the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna (illustrated here). This is believed by some to be by Titian,^[18] but for others "the uncertainty of form and anatomy makes it likely to be the work of an assistant or pasticheur".^[19]

Like many of the paintings of his last years, it was a commission for Philip II of Spain, and was ready for collection by the Spanish ambassador to Venice by August 1571. Titian's own title, from a letter, is Lucretia romana violata da Tarquino ("Lucretia of Rome raped by Tarquinius"). It remained in the Spanish royal collection until 1813, when it was taken to France by Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's older brother, after he lost the Spanish throne. It probably accompanied him to America from 1817 to 1832. After his death in 1844 it was sold in London in 1845, and after several private owners, it was given by Charles Fairfax Murray to the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1918. It was frequently back on the market before this, sold in all six times, probably because of its shocking power.^[21] Murray had bought it in 1886, and sold it by 1911, then bought it again.^[22]

• List of works by Titian

• Fitzwilliam Museum, Webpage on the painting, accessed 1 May 2016
• Freedberg, Sydney J. Painting in Italy, 1500–1600, 3rd edn. 1993, Yale, ISBN 0300055870
• Jaffé, David (ed), Titian, The National Gallery Company/Yale, London 2003, ISBN 1857099036 (Catalogue # 36, entry by David Jaffé)
• Martineau, Jane (ed), The Genius of Venice, 1500–1600, 1983, Royal Academy of Arts, London (Catalogue # 130, entry by Martin Jaffé)
• Rosand, David, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, 2nd ed 1997, Cambridge UP ISBN 0521565685
• Russell, H Diane (ed), Eva/Ave; Women in Renaissance and Baroque Prints, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1990, ISBN 1558610391
• Steer, John, Venetian painting: A concise history, 1970, London: Thames and Hudson (World of Art), ISBN 0500201013
• Stroud, Patricia Tyson, The Man Who Had Been King: The American Exile of Napoleon's Brother Joseph, 2014, University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 0812290429, 9780812290424, Google books