Tarquin and Lucretia includes one element that does not fit the obvious narrative. Although not all that marginal, it does not stand out at first, not least because it seems to pull against the most likely reading. This detail is the angle of Lucretia’s left arm. There is no muscular force there. If she were pushing Tarquin away, pushing as hard as she would have to against his evident insistence, we should expect that arm to be fully extended, rigid. It would be much more difficult to exert force with her arm bent. I cannot escape the feeling that Lucretia’s left hand, the hand with the wedding ring on the third finger, placed at the horizontal centre of the canvas, is not resisting as firmly as it might.
Could this be a mistake? It is legitimate to ask. But this is a late work by a man who was by this time the most famous artist in Europe, and has never to this day lost his place in the pantheon of Renaissance painters. The arm in question is central, moulded in some detail, and highly lit. Nothing about its depiction appears accidental. And what about the rest of the body? Lucretia is in tears, but she is not self-evidently braced against Tarquin’s assault. Is it possible, then, that Lucretia’s resistance is in question?
The classical sources relate that she submits not just to superior force, but in the light of the danger the threat of the slave poses to her honour. By this mean, she protects her husband and her name from disgrace. The visual space of the painting constructs a kind of ironic symmetry between the blond Lucretia and the dark slave, or between the highly lit Lucretia and the slave in deep shadow. Is it possible that the moment Titian has depicted is one not just of external struggle between the protagonists, but of inward struggle for Lucretia herself? Some of the intensity of the image for the viewer would then stem from the fact that the painting arrests the action at a turning-point, the instant when the chaste Lucretia reluctantly concedes the victory and ceases to struggle.
Titian’s triumph is that again and again he gives the impression of painting interiority made flesh. His hunched popes and desiring Venuses seem to put their emotions on display in his canvases. What an extraordinary painting this would be if Lucretia’s body were depicted at the moment of transition between fighting off the rapist and yielding to him under duress.
There is one more possibility. I venture this idea with some considerable (feminist) reservations. We might see Lucretia’s bent elbow as indicating another kind of turning-point. The gesture of the hand on Tarquin’s chest could almost be read as a caress. Once the thought has established itself, I find it difficult to dislodge. Could the transition in question be from resistance to pleasure? And does the theatricality of the painting lie in its capture of that moment in the struggle?
I would certainly do my best to overcome this unworthy speculation, if it were not for the fact that Lucretia’s story was given currency in the early modern period by Saint Augustine, as well as Ovid and Livy. Augustine, who discusses the rape in The City of God, saw sexual desire in fallen human beings as the effect of an involuntary reflex, not subject to conscious control, or, as he would have put it, the will. The disobedience to us of our sexual organs, he believed, was a proper punishment for the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Augustine was not at all convinced that Lucretia, however chaste, was any more able to escape the effects of this sexual reflex than other mortals.
There is a context for Augustine’s doubts. The City of God was designed to reassure the Romans that the fall of the city of Rome into the hands of invading barbarians was not a disaster, because these Goths were also Christians. Augustine’s argument in the early books juxtaposes Christian values with Roman paganism, and argues that Roman ethics were not up to the standard of Christian morality. But surely Lucretia’s example showed that pagan values were at least as demanding? To justify his counter-argument, Augustine skilfully undermines Lucretia’s status as an exemplary Roman matron, by calling in question the heroic account of her suicide. Why did she do it, he asks. After all, if she was innocent, she did not need to punish herself; since she took her own life, however, perhaps it was because - ‘but she herself alone could know’ - she succumbed to involuntary desire, and so committed adultery with Tarquin.
Is that what Titian has depicted? A reflex, the disobedience of the self to the self, not just an assault against her will, but the response of her own body, as much against her conscious consent as the violation itself? What does Lucretia’s face register? Tears, certainly. And in addition, fear? Or an incipient desire, as she holds her attacker so directly in her gaze?
And is that also the source of the ambiguity I began with, the uncertain relationship in the position offered to the viewer between outrage and titillation? Does our doubt about how to read the image repeat Lucretia’s contradictory response? Perhaps undecidability goes to the heart of the painting’s appeal, as it offers to enlist the spectator in the enigma is also depicts.
