Any specific textual analysis is made at a particular historical moment and from within a specific culture. In that sense, the analysis is not exhaustive: it does not embrace all the possible readings, past and future. At the same time, it is able to be new. Suppose we return to the painting and analyse it from the specific point of view of the historical differences it inscribes. Is there anything there that seems to modern eyes to need accounting for? There is the costume, of course, and the bedding ... but those differences are only to be expected. What else might we find?
One feature of this picture does seem odd. I have described Lucretia as naked. She is evidently already in bed, and she is now apparently attempting to get out of it, though Tarquin’s body blocks her escape. But she is wearing at least one earring, a pearl necklace and two quite substantial bracelets, as well as a wedding ring. Surely this jewellery is very slightly out of place? Do people normally sleep in their portable property in this way? Not these days, I think. What, then, do we make of it? Even if Venetian woman habitually wore their jewellery in bed in 1570, the presence of these bracelets, the necklace and the earring seems to me potentially significant.
In the first instance, they might cause us to reopen the question of the overall project. This body is decorated, adorned, and to that degree correspondingly spectacular, an object of the gaze. Second, the jewels indicate Lucretia’s wealth. Do other textual details confirm this? The bedlinen is very fine, almost translucent; is it silk perhaps? The valance is certainly silk. The edge of the pillow facing the viewer is delicately embroidered. Behind the figures, a looped bed-curtain also implies propriety and taste.
By now, our researcher, self-consciously outside the painting, and outside the historical moment when this story would have been familiar, will certainly have been prompted by secondary material to investigate its classical sources, acknowledging in the process the degree to which 'a text is made of multiple writings’. In this instance, the picture retells a well known story; it cites - with an inevitable repetition, and an equally inevitable difference - a narrative that enjoyed wide currency at the time. The sources will have revealed that, while Tarquin was the heir to the kingdom in the early days in Rome, before it became a republic, Lucretia was the wife of his friend and comrade-in-arms, Collatinus, who was evidently therefore of noble blood himself. Does the painting make a relation between rape and rank? Is the intensity of this image linked with the fact that the victim belongs to the rapist’s own social class?
Lucretia’s wedding ring is critically placed on the canvas, exactly at the centre measured horizontally, and one-third of the way down vertically. She is married, the spatial relations emphasise - and married to her rapist’s friend, the story confirms. A new aspect of the research project I have sketched begins to surface in response to these observations, and it concerns the historical specificity of rape. Is it more culpable in Renaissance Italy if the victim is aristocratic and married? Regrettably, I think the answer is yes. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that rape is etymologically theft (‘rapacity’ still indicates a propensity to lay hands on other people’s goods). In medieval law, rape was a crime against the property of the husband or father. Consent came into the question in the first instance in order to distinguish between rape and adultery. It was not until humanism began to invest women with a will of their own that their wishes in the matter became the central issue. The virtue of aristocratic wives must have been a distinctly valuable object. Tarquin’s theft of Lucretia’s is correspondingly disgraceful.
Lucretia herself, whose propriety was part of what inflamed Tarquin in the first place, refused to live with the dishonour, but went on to reinstate her name in the high Roman fashion. Some of the interest the story seems to hold for the early modern period attaches, no doubt, to this subsequent affirmation of her own autonomy in her suicide. How far does this painting align itself with a new humanist interest in the will of the victim?
