История Виргинии

This long, narrow panel was made to decorate a cassone, the painted chest a wealthy Florentine bride brought to her marriage filled with her trousseau. The subject on it is anything but cheerful. It tells the Roman story of Verginia, a young plebeian woman whom the magistrate Appius Claudius tried to seize as a slave so that he could have her. Read left to right, you see her arrested, condemned in court, and finally killed by her own father, who stabbed her rather than let her be taken. Livy wrote that her death so enraged Rome that the people rose up and overthrew the corrupt decemvirs who ruled them. Filippino Lippi painted it in his twenties, probably paired with a matching chest showing the story of Lucretia, another Roman woman whose fate sparked a rebellion.