Lucrécia

Around 1626 Artemisia Gentileschi was working in Venice, the most celebrated woman painter in Italy and one of very few able to run her own studio. Here she takes up Lucretia, the Roman noblewoman who, according to the old story, killed herself after being raped rather than live with the dishonour her society heaped on the victim. Gentileschi shows the instant before, the dagger turned toward her own bare breast, her face caught between resolve and doubt. She painted this heroine more than once, and she knew the subject from the inside, having testified under torture in a Roman court after her own assault years earlier. The picture then dropped out of sight for centuries, and only resurfaced in a French private collection in 2019.