(Milan 1619–1703)
Tarquin and Lucretia,
oil on canvas, 150 x 182 cm, framed

Provenance:
with Compagnia di Belle Arti, Milan;

Private European collection

Exhibited:
Milan, Compagnia di Belle Arti, Pittura Lombarda 1450-1650, 25 May–25 June 1994

Literature:
F. Moro in: Pittura Lombarda 1450-1650, ed. by A. Morandotti, exhibition catalogue, Milan 1994, pp. 88-91;
F. M. Ferro, Nuvolone, una famiglia di pittori nella Milano del ‘600, Soncino 2003, p. 158, pl. CX, p. 273, no. g 149

The present work by the Lombard painter Giuseppe Nuvolone depicts an episode of Roman history that is recounted both by Ovid (Fasti, II, 725-852) and Livy (Ab Urbe Condita, I, 57-59). Lucretia, the virtuous wife of Collatinus, is shown subjected to violation by Sextus Tarquinius, her husband’s friend, and the son of King Tarquinius Superbus. Out of shame Lucretia subsequently took her life with a knife and her husband was to vindicate her by expelling the king, thereby giving rise to the res publica, the first Roman Republic.

In the present canvas, Nuvolone represents the moment when Tarquin, dressed in armour, attacks the terrified Lucretia, grasping her fine dress in his left hand, while in his right, he holds firm his sword with which he threatens the heroine with death. An elderly maid in the left background and a young servant in the right foreground look on.

According to Filippo Maria Ferro (see literature) this work is a reinterpretation of the same subject painted by Titian for Philip II of Spain around 1570 (which today is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). Titian’s work was known to Giuseppe Nuvolone through prints by Cornelius Cort, Mattheus Greuter and Giacomo Lauro, an observation that would appear to demonstrate the versatile and broad cultural horizons of the Nuvolone studio.

The theme of Tarquin and Lucretia is rendered erotically charged in the present work by the strong sensuality of Giuseppe Nuvolone’s painting style, which is characterised by soft and fleshy forms rendered in loose brushstrokes of intense colour. These characteristics, which distinguish his hand from that of his elder brother Carlo Francesco, converge to make Giuseppe one of the protagonists of the Lombard baroque. They express all the freedom and freshness of the new aesthetic, distanced from the mysticism and pictorial rigour of Milanese counter-reformation painting of the early seventeenth century. The author of numerous altar pieces, among which the most celebrated are those in the Duomo Nuovo, Brescia and in the Milanese churches of San Nazaro Maggiore and Santa Maria della Passione, Giuseppe also executed numerous fresco cycles, such as those in collaboration with his brother, Carlo Francesco, in the Xth and XVIIth chapels of the Sacro Monte di Orta, Piedmont.