Without pursuing an answer here, I am suggesting that, while research entails unearthing information, it is the textual analysis that poses the questions which research sets out to answer. The reverse process tends to distort the text. And since the project of cultural criticism is to understand the texts - or rather, to read the culture in the texts - or since, in other words, the texts themselves constitute the inscription of culture, the appropriation of the text to illustrate a prior thesis seems to miss the point. Of course, in practice, it is never quite that simple: once the knowledge is lodged in your mind, it becomes part of what you bring to the text. But in principle, my idea is that the text has priority; ideally, the text sets the agenda.
So, let us get back to ours. Tarquin is fully, though informally, dressed, even if his disordered state is evident in the rolled-up sleeves and collapsing right stocking (‘down-gyved’, like Hamlet’s). These are rich clothes, and they are brilliantly coloured. Oil paint highlights the folds of the fabric with loving verisimilitude. The contrast between Lucretia’s pale, naked, half-supine body and Tarquin’s, defined by both costume and stance as dominant, driven, insistent, emphasises the tyranny of his lawless act.
This is royalty in disarray, in breach of the obligations of monarchy to enforce the law and protect the subject. As Livy tells the story, Lucretia’s rape was an abuse of power so appalling that the Romans rose against it, abolished the monarchy, and installed the Republic. After her suicide, her dead body was paraded through the streets as the motive for a heroic revolt. The rape of the chaste Lucretia led to the overthrow of the Tarquin dynasty and its replacement by a form of government committed to less autocratic values.
The painting, then, does not confine its interest to sexual politics. State politics, too, contributes to its meaning, and the contest it depicts is not only between a woman and a man, but also between a class and its oppressor. On this reading, Lucretia’s struggle against Tarquin stands in for the resistance of the patricians. No wonder the work draws attention to her wealth and taste, her well-appointed bed and the evident propriety of her elegantly dressed hair.
To stand back yet again from what I am putting forward as a research method here, the textual details may be overdetermined, may signify in more than one way. In other words, when we have considered a question raised by the text, we have not necessarily done with it. Lucretia’s jewellery and the rich furnishings make the rape more shocking, according to the sexual politics of the period. But they also vindicate her right - or perhaps her obligation - to resist, as the representative of a class that deserves to be reckoned with.
Meanwhile, Tarquin’s costume makes no attempt at historical accuracy. There is nothing Roman here. Comparison with contemporary paintings reveals that this is a Tarquin in modern dress, the costume of a wealthy Venetian in about 1570. Was this because Titian did not know any better? Or was he simply indifferent to history, like Shakespeare, who brings a striking clock into Julius Caesar? Alternatively, is there a quite different motive for anachronism here? What might the founding moment of the Roman Republic mean in the Venetian Republic in the second half of the sixteenth century?
Venice’s heyday was now past. Instead, the Venetian empire was considerably diminished, and the city itself was threatened by the expansionist plans of the Ottoman Empire to the east. Could this picture be read as an appeal to the Venetian Republic to assert itself against the Turks? The Fitzwilliam Museum, where the painting hangs, places it between 1568 and 1571. Tarquin and Lucretia was sent to Titian’s patron, Philip II of Spain, in 1571. In May that year, a treaty was signed between the Papacy, Venice and Spain to join forces against the Turks. And in October, at Lepanto, Don John of Austria led the allies to defeat the Ottoman Empire. This victory seemed to have beaten back the Turks for good, and was greeted with great rejoicing. What are the resonances of a picture of the founding moment of republicanism, sent by the foremost painter of the Venetian Republic to the King of Spain at this historical moment?
Overcoming my own impulse to follow up this question, I again draw attention to the methodological issues here. The textual analysis I am recommending is anything but an empty formalism. It leads outwards into sexual politics, and then into cultural and political history. But once again the text itself poses the questions that scholarship may be able to answer, and not the other way round. I rather suspect that, if we started from the cultural implications of the battle of Lepanto, we might take quite a long time to get to Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia,
Meanwhile, a related element of the painting would take us back into history in a different way Barely visible behind Tarquin, a shadowed figure, with what appears to be a darker skin than the protagonists’, holds apart the bed curtains and watches the action. His expression is impossible to read: curiosity, outrage, trepidation? Who is this enigmatic observer? The Latin sources reveal that Tarquin backed his violence with a threat still more dangerous to Lucretia’s honour. He will, he says, kill her if she does not submit, and place a dead slave in her bed to destroy her reputation. Adultery with a slave was evidently more scandalous than rape by a king’s son. Lucretia gives in.
To modern eyes the difference between monarchy and republicanism might not seem as large as it did to the Romans themselves. The Roman Republic, too, was founded on slavery. Slavery also played a part in the history of the Venetian Republic. The slave trade was a crucial component of Venice’s commercial success in the early days, and slaves made an important contribution to the economy of the household, as well as in the galleys that made Venice rich and powerful. If domestic slavery diminished in the course of the sixteenth century, the idea of slavery was by no means alien at this time. In 1539 Titian himself painted a portrait of Fabricius Salvaresius with an African page, probably a slave.
What does Tarquin and Lucretia invite us to make of its slave? Anything, or not much? The figure is too indeterminate to be sure. But his inclusion in the margins of the image has the effect of doubling the brutality of Tarquin’s tyranny: in front of Tarquin is a defenceless woman, whose resistance is heroic; behind him is a slave, who has no real scope for resistance. The slave is not in full possession of his own body, since it belongs to another. The painting thus enters into the history of imperialism, in which some people become the property on others and, as such, are expendable at the will of a tyrant. Is it anachronistic to detect a certain symmetry between the highlit Lucretia and the shadowy figure whose defencelessness redoubles hers?
Either way, the slave’s death does not happen. Lucretia is subdued by the threat and no more is heard of the slave.
