Lucretia

Lucretia's story comes from the Roman historian Livy. She was the wife of a nobleman, Collatinus, and after she was raped by Sextus, a son of Rome's last king, she told her family what had happened and killed herself with a dagger. The outrage drove the kings out of Rome. Christian readers kept her as a model of virtue in spite of the suicide.

From the early 16th century Netherlandish painters liked to show her alone, at half length, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum notes that such pictures were understood as images of courage. Joos van Cleve painted this one in Antwerp in the early 1520s and took up the subject more than once, and another version is in Zurich. This one belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Habsburg governor of the Spanish Netherlands, whose collection became the core of the picture gallery in Vienna.