The Suicide of Lucretia

Eros and Politics in the Renaissance

Image coming soon

Extent: 214 pages

Publisher: Wiley-VCH

Subjects: Art & Art History, Early Modern & Renaissance Studies

Series: All'antica

Language: English

Hardback (Forthcoming)

(February 2027)

ISBN: 9781915487100

Price: $157.00

This book examines for the first time the representation of the suicide of Lucretia in Renaissance art, south and north of the Alps.


How can an act as dramatic as suicide become an object of contemplation? This is a question which artists confronted during the Renaissance. This book explores representations of Lucretia’s suicide in the art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, both south and north of the Alps, which offer the image of a living woman in the process of taking her own life, the image of a woman combining virtue and beauty who self-destructs. The author guides us through the political function of Lucretia’s representation as an emblematic heroine of the Roman Republic, exposes erotic tendencies in the representation of female nudity and examines the remarkable analogical connection between Lucretia and Christ’s sacrifice of blood. In order to elucidate the reception of this Roman figure in the Renaissance, the study also probes questions of origins, the afterlife of antiquity, the material restoration of ancient works and the dynamics of political restoration.