Tarquin and Lucretia

Rome had kings until the night a prince forced himself on a nobleman's wife. The story goes that Lucretia, shamed, told her family and then took her own life, and the outrage drove the Romans to expel their monarchy and found a republic around 510 BCE. Tintoretto painted the assault at its loudest: Tarquin lunging, Lucretia twisting away, a pillow still in the air, her pearl necklace breaking and scattering across the sheets. He made it in Venice in the late 1570s, a city proud of its own republic, where this founding tale was told often. Scholars once filed it among his early works, but the tumbling bodies and the flashes of light on skin now place it near the end of his career. The broken string of pearls is the detail to find, small white beads flung loose while everything larger comes apart.