Lucretia Romana Analysis

Art Analysis Essay

In the work Lucrezia Romana by Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, otherwise known as Giampietrino, there stands a contorted woman with a dagger nearly piercing her own flesh as she waits to take her own life. The figure, Lucretia, is a character from the ancient Roman period who was said to have been raped by the son of the tyrannical ruler of Rome. The oil painting on wood was completed in 1540 in the city of Milan, in the midst of the High Renaissance period. While Giampietrino’s painting stands as a remarkable piece of artwork, it must be noted that a lot of the stylistic qualities he implements into the work are extremely similar to that of Leonardo Da Vinci’s. Given that Giampietrino was a student of Leonardo for over 30 years,

Had he been born 100 years prior this work would have most likely looked entirely different. This work, as it contains qualities characteristic of a High Renaissance work, embraces the humanistic spirit in a unique fashion as Lucretia is at the moment right before her own death. A common motif in Renaissance works was to focus on the moment right before in capturing all of the emotion in the figure face the moment before something occurs. And in this work, Lucretia at the moment right before she pierced herself with a dagger, remains tranquil and at peace as she awaits her death. The two ideas, while somewhat antithetical, do align with the narrative of Lucretia in that she survived a rape from a Roman ruler maybe physically but emotionally she’s unable to cope which leads her to take her own life. In this work, Giampietrino incorporates Christian iconographies, namely the cross necklace and the red hair, in a pagan narrative, similar to how Raphael incorporated a myriad of pagan thinkers in his School of Athens which was located in the Vatican. Following Raphael’s lead decades later, Giampietrino is too joining pagan and Christian ideologies in the same narrative. However, the work of Raphael and Giampietrino would not have been possible if not for Dante’s Divine Comedy in which he