Lotto's Lucretia.

"How a state is ruined because of women": This is neither a headline from the Washington Post nor a reference to Diana, Princess of Wales. It is the title of chapter 26 of Niccolo Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy. "Women have been the causes of much ruin," Machiavelli explains, "and have done great harm to those who govern a city, and have caused many divisions in these [cities]."(1) He illustrates the point by recalling how "the excess done against Lucretia took the state away from the Tarquins," the Etruscan rulers of Rome.(2) The "excess" to which Machiavelli refers is the rape of Lucretia, Collatinus's beautiful and chaste wife, by Sextus Tarquinius, son of the Etruscan king. Preferring death to dishonor after she had been raped, Lucretia killed herself. Avenging Lucretia, her kinsmen overthrew the Tarquins and established the Roman Republic:.

According to Roman law, only a father could legally kill an adulteress - and Lucretia had committed adultery.(3) By calling for her husband and father, Lucretia effectively preempted their right to accuse her; by committing suicide, she coopted their right to punish her crime - a crime for which they forgive her but which she cannot forgive herself. According to Livy, the primary source for Lucretia's story, her kinsmen "seek to comfort her ... tell her it is the mind that sins, not the body."(4) Lucretia rejects their reassurances, killing herself to confirm her story and inspire her revenge: "though I acquit myself of the sin, I do not absolve myself from punishment; nor in time to come shall any unchaste woman live if she follows Lucretia's example."(5)

The rape of Lucretia is the inversion of the Rape of the Sabine Women as the origin of the institution of marriage. Anticipating Claude Levi-Strauss, humanist sociologists interpreted the mythical rape as the archetype of exogamous marriage.(6) This interpretation was more than a metaphor for Medieval and Renaissance societies. To be sure, they prosecuted rape as a criminal offense - but the punishment did not fit the crime as we perceive it today. The rapist might be constrained to marry his victim, for example, or merely to pay her dowry, thus enabling her eventual marriage to another man.(7) Rape was thus the origin of marriage, directly or indirectly, so long as one was not concerned with niceties of consent. Precisely because Lucretia was a married woman, however, her rapist could not atone for his crime with matrimony or with money.

If Lucretia is seductive, as Tarquin found her to be, the seduction is inherent in her beauty and virtue. Indeed, some authors tell us that Tarquin found Lucretia's virtue even more seductive than her beauty. In this sense, according to her rapist, the fault for the rape falls on Lucretia herself: "The fault is thine," Shakespeare's Tarquin tells her (line 482). Because she is beautiful and virtuous, he cannot be blamed for being unable to resist her. Lucretia's suicide is her answer to that charge. Had she merely accused Tarquin of rape, her testimony could have been dismissed as mere words, a matter of he said/she said. Killing herself, Lucretia confirms her account with the indisputable closing argument of her own blood.(8)

Dying, Lucretia makes her name immortal. Lucretia is the CASTIS EXEMPLAR UXORIBUS, in the words inscribed on a relief attributed to Antonio Lombardo circa 1515 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. But the display of her nude body seems to contradict this declaration of exemplary chastity. The relief arouses libido, and this arousal is only partly stanched by the inscription that names the subject while reminding us that we are to see this nude as the example of wifely chastity. The male beholder is challenged to resist Lucretia's beauty lest he repeat Tarquin's sin, to recognize her chastity despite the voluptuous display of her nude body.(9)

This ambivalence reflects doubts regarding Lucretia herself: did she love her rapist? Was she complicit in her rape? Even to ask such questions was in effect to attack Lucretia's credibility, and however one might answer them, one could find her guilty - not for her rape but for her suicide. Saint Augustine, Lucretia's most virulent critic, considered her self-immolation to be unforgivable, an act "due to the weakness of shame, not to The high value she set on chastity."(10) Echoing (knowingly?) the comforting reassurances of Lucretia's husband and father, Augustine explains that "there is no unchastity when a woman is ravished against her will." Even were Lucretia "conscious of guilt" for her rape (a question Augustine leaves unanswered), she should not have taken her own life, because the sin of suicide cannot atone for the sin of lust. In this way, as Benedetto Croce explained, "Lucretia came to be condemned in the name of a law that was not her own."(11)

Despite Augustine, however, Lucretia became in effect an onomastic saint, "This earthly saint," as Shakespeare calls her (line 85). To be sure, the saintly imagery was much more common in literature and in baptismal records than in the visual arts.(12) One of Saint Lucretia's modern namesakes is the subject of Lorenzo Lotto's portrait of a woman dating circa 1533 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED].(13) The artist's concern here was how to visualize the ancient heroine's virtue in the person of a contemporary, living woman - a very different matter from representing the historical Lucretia. The simplest solution would have been merely to provide his subject with some attribute that names her and leave well enough alone. Lotto did this, by providing the living Lucretia with a drawing of her historical predecessor; but he also did much more to interpret Lucretia's character, and these additional clues seem to have clouded the issue, at least for some observers.

Although much admired, Lotto's painting has been little discussed beyond the identification of the subject as Lucretia - either a virtuous lady of that name, as most scholars agree, or a false Lucretia who, like Queen Gertrude, "doth protest too much."(14) Indeed, one copy of Lotto's Lucretia was even labelled (or libeled) with the inscription "Portrait of a Great Venetian Prostitute" ("ritratto d'una grande putana veneziana").(15) Recently, the French historian Jacques Bonnet has repeated the argument, reminding us that for many years the portrait was called "La cortigiana." Whereas Bonnet affirms Lucretia's virtue, he also takes note of the ambiguous manner of her representation.(16) These irreconcilable interpretations derive from the woman's appearance and demeanor and are related in turn to the ambivalence that clings to Lucretia herself, and indeed to most images of her: was she morally complicit in her rape, as Saint Augustine believed? To ignore these suspicions about Lotto's protagonist, even if one shares the majority view that this Lucretia is an honest woman, is to ignore the subtleties of his portraiture and to take for granted the remarkable originality of this portrait.

Some art historians have objected that Lucretia's striped gown and jewelry are too ostentatious for a proper North Italian matron of the 1530s. The wallflower (Cheiranthus cheiri L.) lying purposefully on the table is also troubling, an ambiguous symbol that signifies either worldly or sacred love.(17) But even more problematic than her flower and what she wears is how she acts, because her forceful, athletic posture is unexpected and indeed unsuitable for a Renaissance lady.(18) Ladies stand or sit calmly with arms close to the body and legs together; there should be no flailing limbs, no energetic movement, no aggressive gestures. These are postures appropriate only for a man, such as Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, in Titian's portrait of 1536-1538 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. Striding forward, the duke holds his baton of command in his right hand, projecting his arm so forcefully toward us that he seems almost to assault the beholder. Such assertive, even threatening, actions are described as gagliardo in Renaissance manners books and dance manuals. Considered inherently masculine, these actions are deemed appropriate only for men, as Sharon Fermor has explained in her seminal study of "Movement and Gender in Sixteenth-Century Painting."(19) Ladies, on the contrary, do not or should not move or gesture in a gagliardo manner, and in The Book of the Courtier, Baldassar Castiglione cautioned ladies against "movimenti troppo gagliardi."(20) Unlike Franceso Maria, therefore, his duchess, Eleonora Gonzaga della Rovere, sits quietly with a book - presumably a missal or bible - in Titian's portrait painted as a pendant to the duke's in 1538 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED].(21) Contemporaries would describe her comportment and constrained movements as graceful (leggiadra). In the Dialog on the Beauty of Women, published in 1541, Agnolo Firenzuola - or Celso Selvaggio, his spokesman - anatomizes a woman's face and body, from her eyes to her feet, then reassembles the parts in describing the qualities that characterize the loveliest and most lovable of beautiful women, from leggiadria to maesta. Leggiadria, Celso explains, is a natural law of womanly comportment:

Leggiadria is nothing other...than the observation of an unspoken [tacita] law, given and promulgated by nature to you women, in moving, behaving, and using thus the whole person as also the individual members, with grace, modesty, gentleness, measure, elegance [garbo], in such a way that no movement, no action, shall be without moderation, without manner [modo], or without design [disegno]; but, as this unspoken law compels, ordered, composed, regulated, gracious; which law, because it is not written elsewhere but in a certain natural judgement that neither knows of itself nor is able to render judgement, if not that nature wishes thus, I have wished to call "unspoken"; which law nevertheless, because books can not teach it nor practice demonstrate it, is not observed commonly by all beautiful women....(22)

Alas. On the contrary, Celso laments that some are so incapable of observing this unspoken law that it is hard to look at them, "par pure un fastidio a vederle." Celso does name one shining example of leggiadria, however: a modern-day Lucretia, "quella gentil Lucrezia," praised as the "faithful observer of this law."(23)

For Renaissance people, as Fermor explains, gagliardia and leggiadria described movements that were clearly differentiated and defined in relation to gender. To be sure, some qualities are as necessary and appropriate to women as to men, Castiglione acknowledges. In other regards, however, above all in relation to movement and speech, they must take care to differentiate themselves, lest a woman appear virile and a man effeminate:

...for although some qualities are common to both and are as necessary for a man as for a woman, there are yet others that befit a woman more than a man, and others that befit a man and to which a woman ought to be a complete stranger. I say this of bodily exercises; but above all I think that in her ways, manners, words, gestures, and bearing, a woman ought to be very unlike a man; for just as he must show a certain solid and sturdy manliness, so it is seemly for a woman to have a soft and delicate tenderness, with an air of womanly sweetness in her every movement, which, in her going and staying, and in whatever she says, shall always make her appear the woman without any resemblance to a man.(24)

Lotto's Lucretia is conspicuously lacking in all these qualities that constitute lady-like leggiadria. (One imagines that Firenzuola's Celso would have found looking at her "un fastidio.") Or to put the matter another way, Lucretia's contorted pose is gagliardo, hence suitable for a man but not a woman. Lucretia's dying declaration - no unchaste woman shall live if she follows her example - is equally masculine in this sense. No other Renaissance woman behaves this way in her portrait (so far as I know), and few if any other women speak in such a harsh and assertive manner. Lucretia's pose does have a precedent in Lotto's oeuvre, however - not among his portraits of ladies but among the men, in the Portrait of a Man signed and dated in the mid-1520s [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED].(25) Even closer to Lucretia is the Man in Armor by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, painted circa 1527-1530 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED].(26) So Lucretia's posture is masculine, and contemporary viewers surely recognized it as such.

Lucretia's virile pose is related to - but not explained by - the two fictive pieces of paper included in the composition, one with an image of Lucretia's suicide and the other inscribed with her last words according to Livy: NEC ULLA IMPUDICA LUCRETIAE EXEMPLO VIVET, "no unchaste woman shall live if she follows Lucretia's example." (In the first, over-painted version of the inscription, Lotto had written EXEMPLUM instead of EXEMPLO. Lotto's emendation suggests that he wished to quote Livy accurately.)(27)

Why does Lucretia hold that drawing in such a gagliardo manner? Extending her left arm to her left, Lucretia grasps the drawing so vigorously that she creases the paper, which is no way to treat a picture, especially no way for a lady to treat a picture. Meanwhile, she points with the right hand toward the inscribed paper on the table, which involves her crossing that arm around herself. Obviously, Lucretia could easily accomplish her interrelated purposes of holding the drawing, displaying it and the inscription to the beholder, without the vehement contortions that characterize her actions here. Her movements are so forceful that her veil, which should be tucked neatly into her bodice, has pulled loose from the gown and flutters behind her right shoulder.

Saint Lucy knows how to wear a veil: even as miscreants pull and tug at her while she declares her faith to the Roman consul, her veil stays where it belongs, firmly tucked into her neckline in the main panel of Lotto's St. Lucy Altarpiece [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7 OMITTED]. Signed and dated in 1532, the altarpiece is contemporary with the Lucretia, whose sleeves are like Lucy's in design. The more simply dressed female donor of Lotto's Madonna and Child with Donors, dated circa 1533-1535, wears a similar veil around her shoulders and tucked into her bodice [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 8 OMITTED].(28) Neatness counts: athough this pious lady shows some cleavage, she nonetheless receives Christ's blessing. Lucretia's loosened veil makes her look slightly disheveled, inviting doubts about her character for some historians, who are reminded of the partially nude women of so-called courtesan portraits, such as the Flora by Palma il Vecchio, circa 1522-1524.(29)

Lucretia's manner of wearing her jewelry has raised almost as many scholarly eyebrows as her untucked veil. One expects a lady's necklace to be worn around the neck, not folded into her bodice. To be sure, in Lotto's Madonna and Child with Sts. Catherine and Thomas, a work of the late 1520s, Saint Catherine wears her necklace with the chain tucked into her neckline - but she's a saint, of course, and the chain holds a cross, which legitimates and transmutes her fashion statement into an avowal of faith [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED]. Lucretia's necklace, on the contrary, is an avowal of wealth, with a large gem flanked by two putti on cornucopias: her defenders find no obvious reassurance here.(30) The disarray of the veil and the suggested swaying of the chains as they respond to Lucretia's movement are undeniably results of her gagliardia; indeed, her slightly messy fashion mis-statements serve to underscore the vehemence of her posture. At the same time, the cascade of translucent fabric across Lucretia's shoulder onto the wooden chair back ties her otherwise very solid figure to the Lucretia of the illusionistic drawing with its similar movements of drapery and hair. Perhaps the disarray of the modern Lucretia's veil is meant as an indirect allusion to the disarray of Roman Lucretia's garments when Tarquin assaults her and also to the disarray of her drapery when she assaults herself. If the veil suggests assault, however, it is an attack that this woman repels, not only by reference to her ancient namesake but with her serious demeanor and vigorous movement.

This is not necessarily to suggest that Lotto's Lucretia is biographical or related in any specific way to the life of the real Lucretia portrayed here. Even so, one would like to know who Lotto's Lucretia was. The only plausible identity so far suggested is based on an attractive but unprovable hypothesis. Because the painting was documented in the possession of the Pesaro family of Venice in the late eighteenth century, Deborah Howard sought evidence for a woman named "Lucrezia" in that noble family's history. She found Lucrezia di Francesco Valier, who married Benedetto Pesaro on 19 January 1533.(31) Lotto was certainly in Venice at that time, having signed and dated his testament in the city on 28 January, just nine days after the wedding. Thereafter, he seems to have left Venice for a period of seven years.(32) A date circa 1533 is consistent with the style of the Lucretia, as we have seen, and most scholars have accepted the identification of the subject as Lucrezia Valier Pesaro. But the identification perforce remains uncertain. We do not know the painting's whereabouts before 1797, when the Pesaro owned it, much less who commissioned it, and so the fact that a Lucrezia married a Pesaro in 1533 may be fortuitous and irrelevant. One does know how noblewomen behave in their portraits, however, and their behavior is nothing like this athletic display. We recall Titian's portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga della Rovere, a lady of indisputable virtue and social standing, whose posture is appropriately calm and self-contained. Similarly, Titian's La Bella, another work of the mid-1530s, is serene and dignified - although in this case, her virtue has been questioned, at least by some modern historians [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 10 OMITTED].(33) The fact remains, however, that in her portrait, she is well-behaved, by Renaissance standards, acting like a lady whether or not she actually lived as one. But Lotto's Lucretia most certainly does not act like a lady. This is not necessarily to reject the identification of his subject as Lucrezia Valier but rather to underscore the mystery: if this woman is indeed that noblewoman, then the manner of her depiction is all the more extraordinary.

To be sure, Renaissance people may be shown in the act of doing something, as Andrea Odoni holds one of his ancient treasures in Lotto's portrait signed and dated 1527 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 11 OMITTED].(34) But Lotto's Lucretia goes far beyond any of her predecessors, contemporaries or immediate successors in her contortions. Standing between a table and folding chair, she leans against the back of the chair, which is turned away from the table. Everything about this scenario is contrived, that is, arbitrary and artificial. What can explain why the table and chair do not face each other, or why Lucretia veers so uncomfortably between them rather than sitting in her chair? Lotto has set a stage for his protagonist but provides no script to explain her relationship to her environment. In this regard too, the portrait is unlike others, including the Odoni, which puts its furniture to straightforward, practical use.

The style of Lucretia's furnishings also raises questions. In contrast to her extravagant costume and jewels, Lucretia's table is covered with a plain cloth, and her chair is likewise plain, a modest folding chair of X-frame construction with multiple slats. The same kind of chair, with the artist's signature and the date 1515 on the arm, appears in Lotto's Portrait of the Physician Giovanni Agostino della Torre and his Son, Niccolo.(35) The practicality of this portable chair type had endeared it to such scholars as the learned physician in the early sixteenth century, though by the 1530s it must have seemed old-fashioned to even the most scholarly fuddy duddies.(36) So unlike her gown and accessories, Lucretia's furniture is conspicuously unprepossessing and even passe - and yet perhaps all the more meaningful for those very reasons, as signifiers of her intellectual and moral seriousness, which are timeless and not subject to whims of fashion. Renaissance scholars had favored this kind of folding chair because they recognized its derivation from ancient models, which made it inherently prestigious and dignified, hence appropriate for their own scholarly endeavors. Lotto likewise recognized the chair's antiquity. Indeed, Saint Anne has such a chair in her bed chamber as represented in his fresco of the Birth of the Virgin in S. Michele al Pozzo Bianco in Bergamo, signed and dated in 1525.(37) In Lucretia, he treats the chair less as pragmatic furnishing than as a bearer of meaning, an assertion of her (and Roman Lucretia's) dignity.

Turning with Lucretia from the chair to the table, we see the cartellino, an illusionistic piece of paper, which records Lucretia's dying declaration. To be sure, fictive papers or cartellini are commonplace in Italian Renaissance painting, especially in North Italy. Giovanni Bellini, for example, characteristically signed his name on such cartellini in Madonna paintings and in portraits, including the Doge Leonardo Loredan of circa 1501 in the National Gallery, London. In the Nude with a Mirror in Vienna, a cartellino inscribed with Bellini's signature and the date 1515, lies on a table, anticipating Lotto's placement of the cartellino in the Lucretia.(38)

In one sense, Lotto's inscription is unnecessary: the nude who threatens herself with a knife in the drawing can only be Lucretia, and we don't need her words to identify her.(39) But in another sense, more fundamental from the Renaissance point of view, Lucretia's words are essential because they explain and indeed compel her action - not only for herself but for all chaste women in all times to come. The woman who holds the drawing of Lucretia indicates these words with her right hand, thus effectively claiming them, or declaiming them, for herself.' like Roman Lucretia, this wife is chaste, and rather than live unchaste, she would kill herself. And that the living Lucretia is a married lady as well as a chaste one is announced by details of her dress, notably the elaborate headpiece with its white bows, which all but conceals her hair. In Renaissance Italy as in other cultures, married women - including nuns, who are married to Christ - bind and cover their hair with nets, snoods, coifs, turbanswimples, or this kind of loopy concoction, called a zazara. Such zazare were worn by fashionable married ladies in the 1520s and 1530s, including Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua, in her portrait by Titian in 1536 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 12 OMITTED].(40)

Rings on the fourth finger of the left hand are not necessarily a sign of marriage in sixteenth-century Italy, but given the coiffure and headgear of Lotto's subject, we may take her ring as a wedding ring. Even her splendid necklace, gold with gem stones and a pearl, is far more likely to be worn by a wife than a maiden. It is most likely to be understood as a family jewel - his family, that is, not hers: such jewelry belongs to the husband's patriline. A jewel very like Lucretia's pendant is worn as a brooch or aigrette on the hat of the man portrayed by Titian circa 1552, the Portrait of a Captain in Kassel [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 13 OMITTED].(41)

Lucretia's reassuring declaration, then, was and is addressed to her husband - that is, both Collatinus, to whom her words were first spoken, and also the living Lucretia's husband, the intended audience of her image. (Did her first audience, one wonders, include a daughter?) The wallflower lying on the table near the inscription is therefore sacred love, the love sanctified by marriage.

While identifying Lucretia and identifying herself as Lucretia reborn, she also exhorts her audience to follow Roman Lucretia's exemplum virtutis. One reason for her aggressive posture, therefore, is to underscore her commitment to the historical Lucretia's example. Ancient authors had praised such courageous women as Lucretia as masculine. Similarly, in the Renaissance, there was no higher praise for a woman than to liken her to a man - not physically, of course, but spiritually or psychologically. Thus Michelangelo appreciated his friend, the pious and erudite Vittoria Colonna, for her manly virtues, and the Virgin Mary herself was frequently extolled as masculine, spiritually speaking.(42) (To be sure, Christ might be compared to a woman, but that is another story.)(43) So one consequence of the aggressive, gagliardo posture of Lotto's Lucretia is to masculinize her in this sense, which is appropriate for any Lucretia, ancient or modern, and in particular appropriate in relation to her willingness to die rather than live unchaste. The vehemence of the living woman's pose visualizes her decisiveness and ability to act on the dying Lucretia's exhortation. She does not merely identify herself with the ancient Lucretia, paying lip service, as it were, to that heroine, but demonstrates her readiness to follow her example and urges others to follow it. Roman Lucretia confirmed her chastity by killing herself, a proof that is presumably out of the question and, one hopes, unnecessary for the Venetian Lucretia, but she authenticates herself with her vigorous movements. Her unexpected, masculine gagliardia becomes the guarantor of her sincerity, demonstrating her commitment to Roman Lucretia's dying words without necessitating her self-immolation; the vehemence of her action enables the living Lucretia to endorse her predecessor's motto with such conviction. Lotto's Lucretia is an action portrait that becomes in effect a narrative. And what Lucretia narrates is her commitment to chastity.

As a narrative portrait, Lucretia may be compared to the portrait of the bride in Lotto's Venus and Cupid, a work of the 1520s [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 14 OMITTED].(44) In this wedding picture, a contemporary bride is represented in the guise of the pagan goddess of love. Like the bride as Venus, Lucretia has a double identity. Lucretia is both herself, presumably with her own face, clothing and jewels, and she is also her pagan onomastic saint. Double identity explains the transience of their postures, not merely posing but doing - and in each case, doing something significant and germane to their identity. Venus holds the bridal wreath that Cupid penetrates with his fertilizing urine, and Lucretia holds the drawing while declaiming, with ancient Lucretia, that no unchaste woman shall follow her example and live. The modern brides or wives are both themselves, in the 1520s or 1530s, and their classical namesakes. They act for themselves and for their predecessors and, doing so, transform their predecessors into alter egos.

Lucretia's masculine gagliardia is necessary to declare and defend her female chastity. Looking at Lotto's Lucretia, Renaissance viewers could have deciphered this gendered code. Similarly, they could easily understand the subject of the fictive drawing and the significance of the Latin inscription. In the words of Sperone Speroni, "there is no one so vulgar that he does not know who was that Lucretia in Rome who was so famous, as she lived, because she killed herself."(45) As we also know, the woman who stabs herself is Lucretia, and these are the words she spoke as she took her life. Whereas Lotto was punctilious (or nearly so) in quoting Lucretia's last words, however, he was inaccurate in representing her nude as she stabs herself. Lucretia committed suicide in the presence of her father and husband, among other witnesses - a situation that precludes her nudity. Livy and company did not have to explain this; there is no one so vulgar as to think that Roman matrons appear naked in a crowd of kinsmen and their political allies. Other masters honored history and Lucretia's modesty by showing her fully clothed or perhaps with one breast bared to receive the knife, as in Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving after a drawing by Raphael, dated circa 1508-1511 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 15 OMITTED].(46) Like Antonio Lombardo and other masters, however, Lotto makes her nude, with her hair flying loose. With her hair unbound and with her left hand concealing her genitalia, suicidal Lucretia evokes seductive Venus who frequently poses this way. More precisely, Lotto's Lucretia is derived from the so-called Modest Venus or Venus Pudica, one of the most celebrated and most-copied inventions of classical antiquity. Emerging from her bath, the goddess is surprised by a worshiper and attempts to conceal her nudity, thus to restore her pudicity or modesty. The evocation of the Venus Pudica was intended by Lotto, of course, but perhaps unintended by Lucretia herself, or rather intended differently. We are meant to understand this irony, as also the ironic contrast with the living Lucretia.

The adjective "pudica" refers to shame, or to being ashamed, and so when medieval and Renaissance artists read that Eve was ashamed after the Fall, or that Truth was ashamed to be wrongly accused, they represented these female characters in poses derived from the "ashamed" Venus Pudica - including Masaccio, in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, painted in the mid-1420s, and Sandro Botticelli in his allegorical Calumny of Apelles in the Uffizi, painted around 1510 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 16 OMITTED]. Lotto's Lucretia is also ashamed, and like Botticelli's Truth, she holds her right hand away from herself. Truth is proclaiming her innocence, that is, she is proclaiming her identity as Truth, while Lucretia is aiming the knife at her bosom - but with the same proclamation of truth implied in the action. It is precisely this act of self-destruction that gives proof to Lucretia's claims of truth, as she herself has already told us. But she is, after all, nude, exposed to our view and her own blade as she was exposed to Tarquin's violating eyes and threatening knife.

Lucretia is seductive and she is chaste. Her beauty, being a physical quality, is visible; her chastity, a matter of morals, cannot be seen but only asserted by her words or demonstrated by her actions. Consequently Lotto, like Lombardo and many others, advertised Lucretia's chastity in the inscription that accompanies her image. But Lotto did more than this: His Lucretia is more aggressive than the others, and turns the knife unwaveringly toward her breast without averting her gaze. Yet she does not seem to look directly at the knife but rather upward, perhaps toward the past event that propels her action, perhaps toward the future and the restoration of her name that she will now obtain - and perhaps even toward the modern Lucretia. Finally and most important, Lotto's suicidal Lucretia is represented as a drawing, a choice of medium critical to his meaning.

Fictive drawings such as the one in Lucretia's left hand are rare before the end of the sixteenth century when Hendrick Goltzius created his so-called Federkunststucke painted in oil to imitate draftsmanship.(47) (Other later sixteenth-century masters shared this taste for trompe l'oeil media games, including Melchior Lorch who made drawings in imitation of woodcuts.(48)) It was not the illusionism that gave earlier artists pause but rather the particular medium of drawing that they were apparently uninterested in representing. In Renaissance paintings, one finds numerous illusionistic sculptures, including statuary, reliefs, coins and medals, but rarely illusionistic drawings. We recall Lotto's portrait of Andrea Odoni, representing this wealthy collector surrounded by some of his ancient sculptures and coins. Odoni holds one of the marble figurines in his right hand as though offering it for the viewer's consideration. Including sculptures in the portrait, Lotto not only vaunts Odoni's connoisseurship; he also announces his artistic ability as a painter able to represent the rival art of sculpture. Thus Lotto stakes a claim for the superiority of painting over sculpture, a reference to the ongoing debate of the paragone of the arts and their relative merits and limitations in representing nature. Indeed, whenever a Renaissance painter incorporates sculpture in his work, he is alluding directly or indirectly to the paragone debate and the rivalry of the arts.(49)

This discourse explains in part why illusionistic representations of sculpture are fairly frequent in Renaissance art. Painting may also incorporate poetry - its sister art and another rival - by representing the subject engaged in writing or reading a text that the viewer is likewise invited to read, such as the passages of Homer's Iliad that face the beholder in Bronzino's (gagliardo) Portrait of Ugolino Martelli, circa 1540, or Petrarch's sonnet in the same master's (leggiadra) Portrait of Laura Battiferri, painted between 1555-1560.(50) Elsewhere we may see figures holding maps or plans, such as the plans of the drainage canals around Pisa held by Bronzino's Luca Martini, circa 1554-1555, or the Vitruvian plans in Veronese's Daniele Barbaro, circa 1565-1567.(51) Other subjects of portraits may hold the model of a building that he (rarely if ever she) has had constructed, or even the building itself, in miniature, such as the Cappella Scrovegni that Scrovegni and a friar present to the Virgin Mary in Giotto's Last Judgment, circa 1305.(52) And sometimes painting alludes to itself and to its presumably superior mimetic qualities, when paintings appear within paintings: the fictive Stefaneschi polyptych, for example, that the cardinal offers to Christ in the central compartment of the actual altarpiece by Giotto and his assistants;(53) or the fictive panel of the Crucifixion in Fra Angelico's San Marco Altarpiece, dated 1440;(54) or the similar illusionistic panel painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in his fresco of Saint Sebastian Protecting the Faithful against the Plague in the church of S. Agostino in San Gimignano, dated 1464.(55) Indeed, Lotto's first idea for the Lucretia was to paint a figure in colors on an azure ground, presumably representing carta azzura. This figure - simulating a painting on paper - is seen in radiographs and in infrared reflectography, while the blue ground is a pentimento visible as the color underlying the final layer of white.(56) In the final version of the portrait, however, Lotto's Lucretia holds a line drawing.

Among the few such fictive drawings made before the end of the sixteenth century, one notable example comes from north of the Alps: Rogier van der Weyden's St. Luke Drawing the Virgin Mary, a work of the mid-1430s known in several versions.(57) According to legend, the evangelist Luke, patron saint of painters, portrayed the Madonna while she appeared before him. Most artists who represent this legend show the saint painting the Virgin's portrait. Rogier, on the contrary, represents Luke in the act of drawing, perhaps to suggest that this apparition of the Virgin Mary is her first appearance before the artist-saint, when he will be able to complete only a preliminary study. Saint Luke's drawing is a work in progress. Already completed but far less polished is the crude sketch held by the rapscallion in a portrait by Giovanni Francesco Caroto in the 1520s [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 17 OMITTED].(58) Presumably this childish sketch was drawn by the boy himself, or at least Caroto intends the viewer to understand it as the boy's creation, comparable in this regard to Saint Luke's drawing in the Rogier. Similarly, the refined if banal profile drawing of a woman held by Duke Alessandro de'Medici is his own work in the portrait painted by Pontormo in 1534 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 18 OMITTED].(59) Unfortunately, the sketch is almost invisible in photographs; in the painting itself, one sees the duke - like Saint Luke - actually drawing a line with his stylus. His drawing proves that the nobleman is a competent draftsman, a talented dilettante and lover of beauty, as it were - and presumably the doting lover of the lady he portrays. But it does not suggest that his skill is that of a professional artist. Such professionalism is precisely the point of the fictive red chalk drawing that the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli displays in the Self-Portrait painted before 1534 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 19 OMITTED].(60) The fictive drawing advertises his sculpture group of Hercules and Cacus, completed in that year and still in situ in the Piazza della Signoria of Florence.

The drawing held by Lucretia is a sophisticated work despite (or because of) its sketchiness, in this regard, like the skillful drawings by Saint Luke and by Bandinelli and unlike the intentionally simple drawings by Caroto and Pontormo. Each of the other fictive drawings, however, whether crude or polished, is the work of the person who holds it. Lucretia's drawing is likewise her own work. And just as the drawings in the Caroto and Pontormo portraits are conspicuously unlike the draughtsmanship of those masters, this one is readily distinguishable from surviving drawings by Lotto himself, or more precisely, drawings made as himself.(61) Whether the lady represented here actually made her drawing is not the issue. What is important, rather, is that Lotto seeks to suggest that she did so by using a style unlike his own. Contemporary viewers might be expected to have accepted the drawing as her creation.

Even so, one may ask why Lucretia holds a drawing rather than a fictive relief, a statuette, or even a painting within the painting, Lotto's first idea as revealed by the infrareds. To be sure, on the most superficial level, the fictive drawing is a tour de force of illusionistic painting - a trompe-l'oeil bravura display, imitating draughtsmanship with oil, replicating pen strokes with the brush. Lotto insists on the illusion of drawing within the painting by making Lucretia crease the fictive paper - though not so much as to distort the figure drawn there. But most important, Lotto's use of drawing to represent Lucretia's suicide conveys meaning: His medium is in fact the message.

A pen drawing is totally devoid of color, the image being defined only by line. According to ancient and Renaissance thinking, color is inherently feminine and therefore inferior; line, equated with disegno, is on the contrary innately masculine and therefore superior. Line alone may define a thing - as lines define suicidal Lucretia in Lotto's drawing; color may embellish or enrich an image but color by itself is meaningless. The fundamental issue is this: color is feminine and line or disegno masculine.(62) Disegno is the LUX INTELLECTUS, according to Federico Zuccaro; it is "the foundation" ("il fondamento") of the arts of sculpture and painting, according to Vasari, "indeed, the very soul that conceives and nurtures in itself all the parts of intellects, was most perfect from the very beginning of all things."(63) True to his word, when he painted Painting in the Camera della Fama e delle Arti in his house at Arezzo, Vasari represented her at the first moment of her adding color (visible on her palette and brush) to the figure of a man which she has already drawn on the canvas or panel.(64) Had Lotto chosen to represent Lucretia's suicide as a painting within the painting, he would perforce have had to depict her with colors. Looking at Titian's Death of Lucretia, one is reminded how sensuous color may influence the viewer's response to an image [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 20 OMITTED].(65)

If we grant for the moment that Lotto may have wished to avoid the sensual connotations of color in representing Lucretia's suicide, why then not represent a fictive sculpture? Surely the idea must have occurred to Lotto, who had already painted illusionistic sculptures in other works, including the Odoni portrait; and, as we recall, fictive sculpture in painting was far more common than fictive drawing. Moreover, an ancient statue presumed to represent the death of Lucretia had been unearthed in Rome in 1508, so the sculpture medium for the suicide had the advantages of authenticity and of the prestige inherent in anything ancient for a Renaissance audience. The statue inspired a Latin poem by an admiring Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici (the future Pope Leo X) and numerous copies in various media, including Raphael's drawing and the Raimondi print.(66) The sculpture was almost certainly known to Lotto, who was resident in Rome in 1509. But had he painted the suicide as a fictive sculpture, either as a statuette evoking the ancient figure or a relief like Antonio Lombardo's, Lotto would have subjected Lucretia to the tactile sense, inviting the beholder to remember that love begins with sight - and with touch. Titian's portrait of another collector of antiquities, Jacopo Strada, painted 1567-1568, makes the point graphically: clutching his figurine of the Venus Pudica, Strada invites the beholder likewise to imagine grasping her, touching her with his own hands [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 21 OMITTED]. Lotto did not wish to subject his suicidal Lucretia to such sensual manipulations and imaginings.

Making his suicidal Lucretia a two-dimensional image on paper, Lotto protects her from our grasp, a fact that he underscores with irony by the vigor, not to say brutality, with which his real Lucretia grabs the image. Similarly, refusing to color his suicidal Lucretia, Lotto in effect masculinizes her, shields her from the familiar charge of seductive femininity. His fictive, Roman Lucretia is masculinized by use (or imitation) of the medium that defines masculinity in art, namely drawing or disegno. His living, Venetian Lucretia is masculinized by means of her gagliardia.

Was Lucretia complicit in her rape? Did she love Tarquin? Many artists answer "no," but they answer in different ways, Titian with his empathetic depictions of Lucretia's suffering, for example, and Antonio Lombardo with the inscribed words, "Chaste Exemplar of Wives," that declare her innocence despite the display of her voluptuous nudity. Lotto likewise defends Lucretia, but his interpretation of her character involves more multivalent and reverse- or double-gendered proofs of virtue. Lucretia's gagliardia does not signify that she is engaged in a masculine masquerade or that she performs a masculine role. Masquerade may imply disparity between mask and face, between appearance and reality, whereas Lucretia's masculinity is genuine, inherent in her character. Nor is her masculinity merely a role that she assumes during her performance for us, only to return to another self, her true self, when the audience departs. The Lucretia we see is the true Lucretia, a woman of manly virtue. Her masculinity does not reside in who she is - she remains a woman, after all - but in what she does, which is to act, and live, with manly virtue.(67)

Titian and Lombardo arouse the (male) beholder's prurience with their depictions of Lucretia, challenging him to resist Tarquin's crime even while understanding it, to honor Lucretia's chastity even while desiring her. In representing a modern Lucretia, Lotto avoids the dichotomous dilemma of such images, effectively breaking the traditional Lucretia mold. Shielding Lucretia from the beholder's lust, Lotto masculinizes her even while honoring her femininity in the beautifully gowned beauty of the living Lucretia, in the Venus-like incarnation of the suicidal heroine. Their masculinity is psychological or moral and in no way compromises their feminine identity. Gender definitions become malleable, sexual differences fungible, and the admixture of masculine and feminine is seen as a desideratum, devoutly to be wished for, and indeed to be emulated. Lucretia is beautiful and virtuous precisely in her combination of masculine and feminine; unlike Hermaphrodite's monstrous admixture of the sexes, Lucretia's twofold sexual identity is presented as exemplary. Perhaps this is another way of saying that virtue has no gender, or that it has or belongs to both genders. And perhaps such an interpretation of Lucretia contains the germs of destruction of oppressive patriarchal definitions of woman, female chastity and female sexuality, that Lucretia herself had come to embody.

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

1 Machiavelli, 459, citing the Discourses 3.2. For an analysis of Livy's text and other literary sources on the rape, see Croce. For Machiavelli's reference to Lucretia, see Hazard, 26, and Pitkin, 248.

2 Machiavelli, 459.

3 See Richlin. A Renaissance adulteress might be killed by "injured" male parties - her kinsmen - and her murder condoned by the state. See Goffen, 1998, 16.

4 Livy, 1:203 (1.58.9).

5 Ibid., 202-03 (1.58.10-11): "nec ulla deinde inpudica Lucretiae exemplo vivet."

6 See Goffen, 1998, 207; Levi-Strauss; Klapisch-Zuber, "Ethnology of Marriage"; and Wofford, esp. 199-202.

7 See Goffen, 1998,207; and Ruggiero, 93, 111.

8 According to Still, 83, had she not killed herself, "Lucretia's verbal account of the rape could be estimated mere rhetoric."

9 See Goffen, 1998, 192-213, on this relief and other Lucretias.

10 Augustine, 30 (City of God, bk. 1.19). Augustine's criticism of Lucretia is discussed by Allen, 61; Bryson, 165-67; Emison, 376; and Goffen, 1998, 195-96.

11 Croce, 404-05; my translation. Croce, 404-06, discusses the influence of such accusations against Lucretia, including Augustine's arguments.

12 I do not know any Italian Renaissance representation of the Roman Lucretia as a saint. The "S[ancta] Lucretia" who holds the palm of martyrdom in a panel now attributed to Dosso Dossi, circa 1514, represents a ninth-century Spanish martyr of the same name. For the subject and the attribution (the painting was formerly ascribed to Battista Dosso), see Humfrey, 1998.

13 Humfrey in Brown, Humfrey, and Lucco, 185-87. The portrait is painted in oil on canvas, 95.9 x 110.5 cm, and "the canvas has largely retained its original format and dimensions," according to Dunkerton, Penny, and Roy, 59.

14 Gould, 137-38, quotes Hamlet in relation to Lucretia. For similarly negative views, see Ost, 130-36, and Fletcher, 135. Fletcher was mistaken about Lucretia's identity, however; see Humfrey in Brown, et al., 185.

15 Ost, 130-36, and Humfrey in Brown, et al., 185.

16 Bonnet, 136, 196, cat. 89.

17 D'Ancona, 402, no. 165. Humfrey in Brown, et al., 185, mistakenly interprets the flower as a symbol of chastity.

18 As Sheard, 47, recognized: "a provocative, confrontational stare and a vigorous, sweeping gesture, at the time more characteristic of a man than of a woman."

19 Fermor, 130 and passim. Fermor, 131, 132, 137, includes English translations of Castiglione and Firenzuola (among others), and I have repeated some of her quoted passages here.

20 Castiglione, 212 (Lib. 3, cap. 8). Completed circa 1516, the book was first published in 1528.

21 The portrait inspired a sonnet by Pietro Aretino, dated 1537; see Aretino, 1: 77-78, no. 7; and Goffen, 1998, 98, 99.

22 Firenzuola, "Discorso primo" of the Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne, 509-10; my translation.

23 Ibid., 510.

24 Castiglione, 1959, 205-06 (bk. 3.4); the speaker is the Magnifico.

25 For the pose, see Sheard, 47. Berenson, 94, read the partly obliterated date as 1525, but Humfrey considers the painting to be slightly later, a work done after Lottohad left Bergamo for Venice (written communication; also Humfrey, 1997, 172 n. 44). Perhaps the Roman numerals of the inscribed date should be interpreted as 1526 or 1527?

26 Humfrey, 1997, 107, 110, recognizes Lotto's influence on Savoldo's Man in Armor and the similarity of his pose and that of the Lucretia. For the Man in Armor, often misidentified as Gaston de Foix, see Martin.

27 See Dunkerton, et al., 60.

28 Illustrated in color in Humfrey, 1997, 132.

29 See Rylands, 208, on this painting in London, National Gallery, and 89-110 on the type. For a different interpretation of such deshabillees beautiful women, see Goffen, 1998, 65-86.

30 Hackenbroch, 25, describes the necklace and illustrates North Italian drawings for similar pendents dating circa 1520-1540 in the Gabinetto dei Disegni degli Uffizi (24-25). She wrongly identifies the putti as satyrs, however; I thank Peter Humfrey for kindly calling this point to my attention.

31 The archival research was done by Deborah Howard at the behest of Michael Jaffe and published in Jaffe and Groen, 696-702.

32 Humfrey in Brown, et al., 185.

33 On La Bella, see Goffen, 1998, 79, 80-84, 86, 87, 90, 91, 98, 149-50, 155. On problems of idealization and individuality in Renaissance representations of women, see Simons.

34 See Humfrey in Brown, et al., 161-64.

35 For the painting in London, National Gallery, see Humfrey, 1997, 66. The physician holds a copy of Galen (Galienus) and a letter inscribed Medicorum Esculapio... ("to the Aesculapius of doctors...").

36 The chair type is explained by P. Thornton, 180-81, 360, and fig. 196, showing Bernardino Corio seated in such a folding chair in the frontispiece of his History, published in 1503. On Renaissance studies, see D. Thornton.

37 The inscription "Laurentius Lotus MDXXV" is written in the under arch of the entrance to the chapel, located to the left of the chancel. For the fresco cycle, see Barbieri.

38 See Goffen, 1989, 205-12, and 1991; and Matthew.

39 If the woman stabbing herself were Dido, we would see a nearby funeral pyre, as in the engraving attributed to Agostino Veneziano discussed by Emison, 371, 372, 376, 384, and fig. 30. For suicidal women in antiquity, see Emison, 379.

40 For the portrait, see Goffen, 1997, 86-87, 91-92.

41 Hackenbroch, 25, notes the resemblance of the jewels. See Lehmann for the portrait, sometimes identified as Giovanni Francesco Acquaviva d'Aragona, the so-called duke of Atri. Wedding rings and family jewels were commonly removed from one wife to adorn another, "newer" wife as each new bride joined the patriline; see Klapisch-Zuber, "Griselda Complex," esp. 225-28, 233-35, 241.

42 For Colonna, see Ferino-Pagden and Nobbio. For Mary's masculinity, see Castelli.

43 See Bynum and Newman.

44 Sheard, 47, also compares the two paintings. For the Venus as a marriage picture, see Goffen, 1997, 43-44, 124, 146, 305 n. 185.

45 Speroni, 2: 187, my translation: "Chi fusse in Roma quella Lucrezia cosi famosa, come vivesse, perche si uccise ... non e persona cosi volgare che non lo sappia...."

46 The Greek inscription reads "Better to die than to live in dishonor"; see Emison, 379. The pen and brown ink drawing by Raphael (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) which Raimondi evidently used for the engraving was prepared for transfer by incising the outlines with a stylus and rubbing the reverse with carbon dust. The engraving does not match the drawing precisely, however, nor reverse the composition. These facts suggest that the drawing may have been a preliminary but not final study for the print and that other drawings were also employed by Raimondi. See Bambach; Oberhuber; and Stock. I am most grateful to Professor Emison and to George R. Goldner, Drue Heinz Chairman of the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum, for discussing Raphael's drawing with me.

47 See also the ink drawing of the artist's hand, signed and dated 1588, which imitates the technique of engraving. For the drawing and the Federkunststucke, see Nichols, 11, 17-19, and passim.

48 For example, the Turk Playing a Harp by Lorch (1565-1629), pen and black ink, St. Petersburg, Hermitage Museum. The drawing is tentatively related to a print datable 1583; see Larionov. Larionov cites also the works of Jan Wierix (1549-circa 1618) and Jacques de Gleyn II (1565-1629). In Italy, one may note drawings by the Bolognese Bartolomeo Passarotti (1529-1592), including the Head of Christ with a Medallion of the Trinity, now in the Princeton Art Museum, which simulates engraving; see den Broeder, 46-48. Paintings imitating drawings are more unusual than these other "imitative" media.

49 On the paragone in sixteenth-century Veneto art, see Goffen, 1997, Martin, and Vertova; for the paragone in Raphael's circle, Hulse, 77-114; for Varchi's lezioni on the subject, Boudon and Mendelsohn; for a recent survey of the subject, La Barbera; and for Renaissance use of the verb, paragonare, Farago, 18, 311 n. 37, and passim.

50 For the Martelli in Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preuszischer Kulturbesitz, Gemaldegalerie, see Cropper, 149-60, esp. 150 on Bronzino's interest in poetry and the publication of his poems, and 155 on the text of the Iliad, bk. 9, which Martelli shows us. For the Battiferri in Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi, see Plazzotta. See also McCorquedale, 50-53 (Martelli) and 139-40 (Battiferri).

51 Martini had designed the canals; for his portrait by Bronzino in Florence, Palazzo Pitti, see McCorquedale, 140, 144, and pl. 96. Barbaro holds a Vitruvian plan and an open volume of Vitruvius, Dieci Libri dell'Architettura, showing the text and an illustration; Barbaro translated and annotated the Ten Books for publication by Marcolini in Venice, 1556. For Veronese's portrait of Barbaro in Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, see Rearick, 1988, 99, cat. no. 60. Rearick also notes Veronese's lost portrait of Barbaro, probably painted in 1561, in which he held the plan of Palladio's Villa Barbaro at Maser.

52 The fresco is a portrait likeness of the chapel; for color illustrations, see d'Arcais, 142, 146.

53 Illustrations in ibid., 306-07, 309. As d'Arcais explains, 305, the polyptych, now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana, was commissioned for the high altar of St. Peter's by Cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi. The author argues for a date circa 1320. The original frame is lost but may be imagined from its representation in the polyptych.

54 See Hood, 97-100, esp. 98 on the fictive panel.

55 Ahl, 142, 144-48, 259-60, 279; and Ronen.

56 The infrareds and radiographs are published in Dunkerton, et al., 57-61. They also show that Lotto altered the background of Lucretia's room, abandoning his first idea of rose and azure stripes.

57 Davies, 36, 204-05, considered the Boston version to be the original; for other versions, see ibid., 210-11, 235, 240. Luke has sometimes been identified as Rogier's self-portrait; ibid., 204. More recently, technical evidence seems to confirm that the Boston panel is the original of the copies or variants; see Faries. There are other Netherlandish examples of the subject of Luke's drawing the Virgin Mary, including two panels by Jan Gossaert (il Mabuse) and a painting by Martin van Heemskerck; see Riviere.

58 The composition is based on a work by Bernardino Luini, Portrait of a Boy (of three years?), in Peterborough, Elton Hall, Proby Collection; the child shows us a game of patience. See Della Chiesa, 131, cat. no. 216; and Fiorio, 100, cat. no. 48 and fig. 27.

59 According to Vasari, 6: 278, Duke Alessandro presented the portrait to his mistress Taddea Malaspina, who is presumably the woman in the drawing. The drawing is more legible in the copy of the painting in Lisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, published by Steinberg, 64. Steinberg discusses Pontormo's painting in relation to Castiglione's endorsement of drawing as a suitable pursuit for the courtier (Cortegiano bk. 1.49). See Cox-Rearick, 1: 232-33, for the duke's mourning costume (the portrait is dated in relation to the death of his presumed father, Clement VII, in 1534). For the painting's condition, see Strehlke, 3-5.

60 On Bandinelli, see Gatteschi.

61 Tietze and Tietze-Conrat, 1: 182-87, esp. 182. The authors explain that the drawing of suicidal Lucretia "may be a good example of a category then represented abundantly, but now . . . not by a single specimen" in Lotto's surviving graphic oeuvre. Rearick admonishes us to remember that only a fraction of Lotto's drawings has survived and that therefore we cannot be certain about the varieties of the styles, types, and media of his drawings. See Rearick, 1980, 23-36, esp. 24; and also Matthew, 636.

62 On the Renaissance debate regarding disegno and colore, based on the differentiation of masculine form and feminine matter, see Goffen, 1997, 10, 228, 232-35, 241, 271; and Summers.

63 Vasari, Proemio delle Vite (1568), 1:215, my translation: "anzi l'istessa anima che concepe e nutrisce in se medesima tutti i parti degli intelletti, fusse perfettissimo in su l'origine di tutte l'altre cose . . ." See also Vasari, Proemio di tutta l'opera, 95: ". . . la plastice e la pittura naschino insieme e subito dal disegno." The personification of Disegno resembles God the Father in Zuccaro's fresco circa 1590 in the Sala del Disegno of the Palazzo Zuccaro in Rome, the meeting room of the Accademia di San Luca; Disegno is accompanied by his daughters Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. See Herrmann-Fiore, esp. 247-48.

64 Illustrated in Rubin, 137 and pl. 59.

65 Dated circa 1525 and attributed to Titian in Goffen, 1997, 198-201 (color plate, 200). Shearman, 280-82, cat. no. 304, gives the painting to Titian's brother Francesco Vecellio.

66 For the cardinal's poem - written in Lucretia's voice - and the ancient statue wrongly identified as Lucretia, see Emison, 378; and Stechow, 118.

67 The fundamental study on the female masquerade is Riviere, "Womanliness as Masquerade," first published in 1929. On the distinction between the masquerade and the role, see Brod.

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