Lucrecia

Raphael drew this in his first years in Rome, around 1510, while he was painting the pope's private rooms in the Vatican. It shows Lucretia, the Roman wife whose story every educated viewer then knew: shamed by an assault, she gathered her family, told them what had happened, and took her own life, and the outrage that followed helped topple Rome's kings and bring in the Republic. Raphael catches the instant before, the dagger already turned toward her chest. He was steeped in ancient sculpture, and he gives her the calm, monumental bearing of a statue rather than a woman in panic. The engraver Marcantonio Raimondi, whom Raphael trained, soon cut a Lucretia after the master, and prints carried the design across Europe. The sheet is worked in pen and brown ink over a first sketch in black chalk.