Lucrèce

This was one of the last things Parmigianino painted. He died in the summer of 1540, aged 37, worn down by fever and, the old accounts say, by an obsession with alchemy that had pulled him from his brushes. Vasari, who wrote his lives of the painters soon after, remembered a Roman Lucretia by his hand as almost divine, then noted that by his day it had already been stolen and no one knew where it was. The subject is the Roman noblewoman Lucretia, who took her own life in front of her family after she was raped by a prince, an act Roman writers said brought down the monarchy. Parmigianino gives her the long neck and tapering fingers of his elegant late style, the dagger already at her breast, her eyes turned up and away.