Lotto's Lucretia
Lotto's Lucretia is posed in a way that Renaissance viewers would have recognized as masculine and therefore inappropriate for a lady. Moreover, Lucretia holds a fictive drawing, representing the suicide of her Roman namesake. The depiction of a fictive drawing was quite exceptional in the 1530s. Lotto's reasons for posing his Lucretia in such an unexpected, masculine way, and his representation of her predecessor's death as a fictive drawing are the means whereby he asserts her virtue. Doing so, Lotto seems to question the traditional patriarchal definitions of woman, female chastity and female sexuality that Lucretia herself had come to embody.