Morte di Lucrezia

The scene is a Roman legend the Renaissance loved to retell. Lucretia, a noblewoman shamed by the king's son, stabs herself before her family rather than live dishonoured, and her death, the story goes, sets off the revolt that ends Rome's monarchy and founds the Republic. Filippino Lippi painted it as a young man, probably in the late 1470s, still close to his teacher Botticelli, whose crisp figures you can feel here. It is a long horizontal panel, made to be set into furniture or wall panelling in a Florentine palace, likely around a marriage. In the middle her body is laid out on a bier as a crowd gathers under the arcades. A companion panel by Lippi, telling the parallel Roman story of Virginia, is now in the Louvre in Paris.