Lucretia's rape by Sextus Tarquinius, and her suicide, large miniature on a leaf from an illuminated album amicorum, manuscript on paper [southern Germany (perhaps Tübingen), mid-sixteenth century (before 1561)]

a leaf, 187mm. by 135mm., with two large scenes showing (a) Lucretia clambering naked from her ornamental four-poster bed as her attacker naked apart from his feathered cap goes to stab her with a dagger, his clothes placed on a chest behind, and (b) Lucretia standing before her father and her husband, Collatinus, and his follower Valerius, raising the same dagger to plunge it into her breast, details touched in liquid gold, panel beneath containing explanatory text in Latin (partly torn away with some very minor losses to base of miniature, now restored), names added to miniature in late sixteenth century, on verso: princely coat-of-arms (3 scallops gules on or) supported by a male and female nobleman holding a hawk and a flower, and the date '[15]60', slight scuffs, discolouration at edges, and small losses to outer and upper edge, else good and presentable condition, framed

The legend of Lucretia, wife of Collatinus, gained fame through the poem Fasti by Ovid (43 BC.-17/18 AD.). In it the poet narrates how Sextus Tarquinius, the son of the last king of Rome, struck by Lucretia's chaste beauty, broke into her bedchamber demanding submission at knife-point. She refused, and he threatened to kill her and a male servant and to leave their entangled bodies for her husband to find, forcing her to comply. Overcome by remorse, she summoned her father and her husband. She told them of the crime, declared her heart innocent and demanded vengeance for her death, stabbing herself to death before them. The tale was the subject of the poem by Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece (1594).