The Death of Lucretia

The rape and suicide of Lucretia — the Roman woman whose honour violated by Tarquinius Superbus and avenged by her own death triggered the expulsion of the kings and the founding of the Roman Republic — was one of the canonical subjects of history painting's moral programme. Hamilton's 1765 treatment at the Yale Center for British Art arrives at the beginning of the Neoclassical revolution in history painting, and it was precisely subjects like this that defined that revolution's moral agenda: ancient Romans dying rather than submitting to tyranny offered exempla virtutis that transcended mere decoration. Hamilton had been developing his Homeric cycle in Rome, but the Roman historical subject of Lucretia brought the programme directly into the political sphere that Winckelmann's advocacy of ancient republican virtue implied. The Yale version is one of Hamilton's most important contributions to the founding vocabulary of Neoclassical history painting.

The dying or dead Lucretia is the compositional centre, surrounded by mourning family members whose varied expressions communicate the complex of grief, outrage, and political resolve that will transform private tragedy into public revolution. Hamilton gives the scene both emotional immediacy and rhetorical legibility, the body posed to display moral meaning as much as physical fact.