The Suicide of Lucretia

This Lucretia is life-size, a standing nude almost two metres tall, and for a long stretch of her history she was used to hide another one. The Cranach Digital Archive, the research database on the painter's work, records that by the 17th century the panel had been overpainted and hung in the art cabinet of Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, in front of a nude Lucretia by Albrecht Dürer, which it covered. In that century the picture was also given a date, 1524, added by a later hand. The overpaint and the false date both came off in 1919, which is why the museum now dates the panel only broadly, between 1524 and 1530. The museum also recalls the threat behind the story. The king's son, Sextus Tarquinius, told Lucretia that if she refused him he would kill her and lay a murdered slave beside her body, so that she would be remembered as an adulteress.