Lorenzo Lotto  c. 1480–1556/7
NG 4256 
Portrait of a Woman inspired by Lucretia

Nicholas Penny, 2004

Extracted from:
Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume I: Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2004).

c. 1530–2

Oil on canvas, 96.5 × 110.6 cm

Support

The measurements given above are for the stretcher; those of the original painted surface remaining are 91.5 × 105.6 cm. The fine tabby‐weave canvas, with cusping visible at all the edges (although only slightly so at the lower one), is lined with glue paste onto a larger canvas of medium weight. It has been claimed that the painting was ‘probably transferred from panel’ and ‘probably somewhat cut down’.¹ This is erroneous. The turnover edges of the original canvas have, however, been trimmed, and a little of the painting may have been lost along the lower edge.

Materials and Technique

The painting has a gesso ground (calcium sulphate) with a light brownish‐grey priming consisting of lead white with a little black and possibly some umber.²

Originally the table‐cloth had blue stripes, and remains of this colour may still be detected around the edges of the paper and the flower which lie on it. X‐radiographs reveal that it was originally broadly striped (fig. 1). The stripes were parallel with the edge of table that faces us. X‐radiographs and cross‐sections also reveal that the background was not originally grey, but had broad vertical stripes of pink (lake) and violet or lilac (azurite and lake) and blue (azurite).³

A coloured representation of Lucretia is visible below the ink drawing on the sheet of paper the woman is holding (fig. 6). In it her head is facing in the opposite direction and is placed lower down, level with the left shoulder of the present figure. Her right hand appears below and to the right of the present one, with the knuckles uppermost. Her left arm is raised up high, bent at the elbow and with hand outstretched, the palm apparently facing upward and away from the body, in the attitude of an oriental dancer. The drapery of the original figure appears to fan out to the left in a more angular arrangement than the one eventually preferred. The left foot seems to be raised on a spreading plinth. Above and to the left there is a Corinthian capital. This earlier representation had a coloured background (most probably blue, a colour of paper much used in Venice) with a white border. Enough of the colour shows through the present sheet to make the drawing resemble a print with a faint plate‐mark.

The text on the piece of paper that lies on the table has been corrected, apparently from exemplvm to exemplo. A slight pentimento is apparent in the hair passing over the woman’s right temple.

Small touches of shell gold are visible on the ridges of the woman’s wedding band, on the mount of her jewelled pendant and its chains, and in her veil where it falls over the chair back beside her. This subtle use of gold is also found in Lotto’s double portrait of Marsilio and his bride in the Prado, Madrid (for example, for the wedding ring and the tips of Cupid’s arrows), but is not invariably found in Lotto’s pictures of this period (none, for example, can be discerned in the double portrait in the Hermitage).

The use of a point to scratch through the wet paint is evident in some of the curls of the headdress and in the drawing of Lucretia, where it is combined with grey‐black paint applied wet‐in‐wet and worked rapidly into the white of the paper.

The orange of the woman’s dress is painted in pure mineral realgar (arsenic disulphide) with pale yellow highlights of lead‐tin yellow on the sleeves. The deep greens are made up of multiple applications of copper green glazes and semi‐glazes incorporating some white.

Conservation

The painting is known to have been in the studio of the Bolognese restorer Giuseppe Guizzardi in the winter of 1828–9 (see below). On its acquisition by the National Gallery in 1927 the condition was described as ‘fair’ – old varnish was removed and during that summer some cleaning, probably superficial, was undertaken by ‘Holder’, chiefly to ‘amend’ discoloured retouching. Loose paint was secured in 1939 and 1941, most of it in the grey background (chiefly to the left of the figure) and some in the dress to the right of the woman’s right hand and along her left sleeve. Numerous blisters were laid in 1952. In 1964 the painting was relined, and in the following year it was cleaned and restored.

Condition

Viewed as a whole and from a distance, the painting appears to be in good condition, but close examination of details can be disappointing. However, the creamy texture of the chemise in the slash of the woman’s right sleeve and the white ribbons in her headdress are beautifully preserved.

There is a fine craquelure in the glazes used for the shadowed areas of the table‐cloth and the bodice.

There are extensive flake losses: most notably in the grey background to the left, but also along the lower edge, in the green panel of the skirt of the woman’s dress and in a strip to the right of this panel. There are also losses in part of the cuff of the woman’s right‐hand sleeve and in the dress, below her right hand. Losses in the flesh are fewer, but they include an area between the woman’s nose and the pupil of her left eye, an area on her right temple and an area in the hair beside her left eye. Some of the retouchings have become slightly discoloured: notably, spots on the woman’s right cheek and cracks across her chest.

Of more significance than these losses is the abraded condition of the surface overall. The nail and knuckle of the woman’s right thumb, for instance, would surely have been more pronounced originally; her left hand is better preserved. It is also likely that glazes were lost in the dress. These would have both reduced the effect of highlights in the green and adjusted the effects of modelling, in some areas crucially. At present, for instance, the left sleeve below the puff seems to project almost as much as the puff itself. The green is probably best preserved in the bodice.

A certain amount of pink is now visible in the orange on the underside of the left sleeve: this would have been glazed with brown. Some old retouching in the dress has not been removed. This is most notable and most distorting in the highlights of the green.

Attribution and Dating

During the eighteenth century and for much of the nineteenth the painting was believed to be by Giorgione or to be a copy of a Giorgione. In 1871 it was published as a Lotto by Crowe and Cavalcaselle⁴ and this attribution has never since been disputed. It has been dated to the early 1530s on account of the sitter’s clothes, though such a date makes sense for at least two other reasons.

The use of a shadowy stone‐grey background is found in Lotto’s portrait of Andrea Odoni in the Royal Collection, dated 1527 (fig. 1, p. 49). It was developed as a device by the artist in his altarpiece for Jesi, dated 1532, depicting Saint Lucy before the judges (fig. 2, p. 50), in which figures in brilliantly coloured clothes and with demonstrative poses are placed in an architectural setting that provides a background which is similar to NG 4256 not only in colour but also in lighting. Lotto’s interest in shadowy interiors was probably stimulated by his designs for the intarsia choirstalls in Bergamo, made between 1524 and 1531.

The gesture that Lucretia makes with her right hand – pointing with the palm upward and the fingers (except the index finger) slightly curled – is somewhat unusual, but was also employed by Lotto in paintings of the Holy Family with Saint Catherine of 1529 and 1533 (private collection and Bergamo, Accademia Carrara), in a portrait of a man in the Isaac Delgado Museum, New Orleans, generally dated to this period, and by the angel who directs the donor’s attention to the swooning Virgin in Lotto’s altarpiece of the Crucifixion at Monte San Giusto, dated 1531.

The horizontal format, unusual for a portrait, distinguishes this from earlier surviving independent female portraits by Lotto. It was, however, employed by him for earlier male [page 77]portraits of very similar size – that of Andrea Odoni, already mentioned (104 × 116.6 cm), and that of the melancholy young man in the Accademia, Venice (98 × 116 cm). Such a format provided the opportunity for a very open pose and an outstretched arm, also found in the portrait of a man in the Cleveland Museum and in the painting (probably copied from Lotto) in the Accademia di Belle Arti Tadini in Lovere;⁵ moreover, it enabled Lotto to incorporate into his portraits symbolic and textual elements which he had previously incorporated in the covers of portraits, and which others had also painted on the reverses.

Although the prevailing orange, green and rose cannot be found in any other painting by Lotto, the same colours are used in combination in the figure of Saint Lucy in Lotto’s altarpiece in S. Maria dei Carmini in Venice, the frame of which is dated 1527 and which is also said to have been completed in 1529.⁶

The lighting scheme chosen by Lotto for this portrait is also unusual, coming from the right and in front of the sitter. However, lighting of precisely the same kind is found in the great sacra conversazione in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, which must be more or less contemporary with the Carmini altarpiece.⁷

Situation, Accessories, Dress

A fashionably dressed woman stands between the back of an armchair (sometimes this has been mistaken for an empty cradle⁸) and a table, holding in her left hand a drawing of the Roman heroine Lucretia about to stab herself. She points with her other hand towards this drawing and another sheet of paper which lies on the table. The latter, previously folded in four, is now open to reveal the Latin text: NEC VLLA IMPVDICA LV/CRETIÆ EXEMPLO VIVET (fig. 2) (a passage which is hard to translate, as explained below). These, according to Livy, are Lucretia’s last words, and thus the words she may be imagined to utter at the moment shown in the drawing. The gist is that by killing herself she will deprive unchaste women of a possible excuse for living.

There is also a yellow wallflower (cheiranthus cheiri) on the table. Dr Celia Fisher notes that such flowers were favoured on account of their sweet scent, hence their popularity in nosegays (which explains the names handflower and baton d’or). They were deemed soothing (cheiri) rather than curative.⁹ Galen recommended the flower: ‘it clenseth the blood, and freeth the liver … provoketh women’s courses … is a singular remedy for gout.’¹⁰ Modern sources claim that it possesses diuretic and cardiotonic properties.¹¹ In Italy the wallflower is a common wildflower. No entirely convincing account of the meaning of its presence in this painting has been advanced. But it is worth noting that the flower was considered suitable as a lover’s gift – the Hungarian knight Panaro presents one to the beautiful Lucrezia in Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s popular romance Storia di Due Amanti, printed in numerous editions from 1468 onwards. Wrapped around the stem of Panaro’s flower is an amorous message written on fine paper.¹²

The empty chair is inevitably suggestive of an absent partner – presumably the lady’s husband – and it must be he who is addressed by this eloquent but mute woman. She wears a gold band on her marriage finger.

On her chest there is a pendant with a large rectangular red stone (presumably a ruby) in a setting incorporating four smaller rectangular stones (three of them blue), a pair of gold putti (with thighs so large that some commentators have suggested they are satyrs) above and a pair of gold cornucopias below (fig. 3). The side‐stones are supported above the cornucopias by the putti’s raised feet; the putti hold the suspension ring above; there is a large, irregular pearl suspended from the crossed points of the cornucopias below. This is entirely [page 78]convincing as a real piece of jewellery, and it reminds us that Lotto had close friends who were jewellers. A drawing for a similar pendant, also involving cornucopias and putti, is in the Gabinetto dei Disegni in the Uffizi, Florence.¹³ Such pendants are likely to have been associated with weddings and were referred to as bridal pendants (‘pendente di moglianza’) in Florentine documents half a century earlier.¹⁴ Some idea of the value of a pendant of this kind may be obtained from the inventory of Jacopo Memmo’s belongings that was made on 26 August 1535, in which ‘un pendente tondo con un safil in mezzo perle no. 4 e rubini no. 7 Bigadi in oro smaltado’ (‘a pendant roundel with a sapphire surrounded by 4 pearls and 7 rubies set in enamelled gold’) was valued at 100 ducats – two or three times as much as Lotto would have charged for this painting.¹⁵

The gold chains attached to the pendant are tucked into the woman’s bodice, a precarious arrangement that suggests hasty improvisation and thus enhances the air of urgency, no less than does the fine scarf that has escaped from one side of the bodice and floats over her shoulder to catch on the back of the chair. Given the value of the pendant, it is hard to believe that this was a fashionable way to display it (like the current casual habit of wearing sunglasses in the hair), although Saint Catherine, who kneels with Saint James the Great beside the Virgin and Child in Lotto’s sacra conversazione in Vienna, has treated her gold chain and cross in the same way. (It has been plausibly suggested that the woman is, in fact, a portrait of a donor as Saint Catherine.¹⁶) The dress is made of orange silk and green velvet, arranged in panels and with applied bands of varying widths. In places, the broader bands or panels of velvet must have replaced the lighter coloured silk as the main cloth of the garment. The material is slashed in places on the sleeves, revealing a grey fur lining, and a fine white linen undershirt, which is also visible at the neckline and cuffs. On the sitter’s right side, the material at the neckline has been coarsely pinked along the edges. A shimmering, transparent silk veil, striped with gold thread, wafts over her left shoulder. Lisa Monnas, to whom the above description is due, adds that Venetian sumptuary legislation ‘stipulated that cloth should not be quartered or striped in precisely the way that it is shown in this painting’.¹⁷ Similarly the regulations made in Brescia in 1534 insisted that women wear dresses of a single colour of silk without cut or banded pattern (‘ne portatura alcuna de seta qual sia tagliata ne stratagliata’).¹⁸

The ribboned cap, or scufia, is of a shape datable to around 1530. For a fuller account, see the Appendix below. It also seems to have been about 1530 that sleeves were divided into a puff or series of puffs on the upper arm, contrasted with a tight lower sleeve. As the decade progressed, the size of such puffs diminished. The relatively low‐cut bodice and narrow band of chemise, and also the break (probably a tuck) in the skirt a few inches below the waist, are found in a portrait by Bartolomeo Veneto dated 1530 now in the Timken Art Gallery, San Diego.¹⁹ These are, in fact, also features of Saint Lucy’s dress in Lotto’s altarpiece for Jesi, and her dress also has slashes in the sleeve below the puff. So too does a portrait signed by Bernardino Licinio and inscribed with the date 1532.²⁰ The front lacing of the bodice is an unusual feature, also found in a portrait in the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, of a woman wearing a similarly beribboned hat and brilliantly coloured puffed sleeves, attributed to Morando.²¹

The cuffs, the two visible slashes on each sleeve and the opening in the front of the skirt are all trimmed with ‘gris’ – the grey fur of the north European squirrel. The white belly fur (‘miniver’) seems to have served for the bracelets worn over the densely pleated chemise.²²

As noted in the section on Technique, the table‐cloth had been painted with broad stripes before Lotto decided to make it red.²³ The broad vertical stripes originally painted on the wall behind the sitter are more surprising, but a hanging of this kind is to be seen in an anonymous full‐length portrait of a young boy in the National Gallery (NG 649), datable, on grounds of dress, to the 1540s.²⁴ And walls broadly striped in grey and black have been discovered in recent years beneath the whitewash in Palazzo Pretorio in Cittadella, decoration dating from 1503 when the palace was assigned to Pandolfo Malatesta of Rimini by the Venetian Senate.²⁵

Role and Identity

One of Lotto’s two earlier surviving independent portraits of women, painted in Bergamo about a decade before NG 4256, represents Lucina Brembati – identifiable from the moon ‘luna’ behind her on which the letters ‘ci’ are inscribed.²⁶ A reference to the sitter’s name was often included in Italian portraiture of this period. From Lotto’s Libro di spese diverse we also know that in 1551 he painted an Alessandro in the guise of Saint Alexander,²⁷ and there are several surviving paintings by Savoldo which seem to represent the sitter (in two cases female) in the guise of his or her name saint.²⁸ The practice may have begun in the portraiture of friars and monks who identified with the saints of their order and sometimes also replaced their own names with those of these saints. The painting of Fra Teodoro da Urbino as Saint Dominic by Giovanni Bellini(?) and the portrait of another Dominican with the attributes of Saint Peter Martyr from Bellini’s workshop (both in the National Gallery: NG 1440 and NG 808) seem to belong to this category.²⁹ In this connection it is noteworthy that Matteo Bandello dedicated his novella of Lucretia (XXI of his Parte Seconda) to Lucrezia Gonzaga da Gazuola (b. 1522).

The painting catalogued here has long been entitled Portrait of a Lady as Lucretia. Berenson in his monograph on Lotto was careful to title it simply as a ‘portrait of a lady’, but he noted that it was commonly called ‘The Holford Lucretia’.³⁰ The sitter, who was very likely called Lucretia, is not in fact cast as the Roman Lucretia but seems to indicate that she would be prepared to follow that heroine’s example. Had she been depicted as Lucretia then she would be claiming (or would be liable to be understood to be claiming) that she had been dishonoured. Instead, by holding a drawing of Lucretia she can make a conditional point: she would, in certain circum[page 79]stances, act thus. The evocation of another identity is part of the assertion of the sitter’s own personality, whereas in portraits of sitters in the guise of a saint their own personality is submerged and the painting cannot claim to report on an actual situation. The distinction is clear if Lotto’s portrait is compared with Bernardino Luini’s Saint Sebastian – a portrait of a bearded man stripped naked and bound to a tree – of about the same date in the Hermitage, St Petersburg (fig. 4).³¹ He is presumably a man named Sebastiano, and he points with his left hand at arrows piercing his bare chest and with his right hand at a tablet, hanging from a branch, which bears a Latin text referring to his willing endurance of Love’s arrows. His being depicted as Sebastian much diminishes the degree to which we can take him seriously.

It is not easy to find another Renaissance portrait in which a drawing is used as it is in Lotto’s painting, but in his self portrait in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Bandinelli depicts himself holding a drawing of Hercules in one hand and pointing to it with the other, and in the Pinacoteca of Cremona there is a portrait attributed to Lavinia Fontana in which a seated man with a boy by his side holds a drawing of Hercules struggling with the Hydra (fig. 5). In both cases the drawings surely allude to heroic struggles, rather than serving as proof of proficiency in the fine arts, as must be the case with the drawings after the antique held by youths in Licinio’s group portrait at Alnwick Castle.³²

Lucrezia Valier?

Lotto’s portrait seems to have been recorded in Palazzo Pesaro (see below) and Michael Jaffé proposed that it represented Lucrezia, daughter of Francesco Valier and Paola d’Alvise Zen, who married Benedetto Pesaro on 19 January 1532 (1533).³³ Given the sitter’s ring and the fact that her hair is bound up, the portrait must date from after the marriage. It was perhaps a gift to her husband for him to take with him on a journey that would separate them for some time. Lotto made a will in Venice on 28 January 1532 (1533)³⁴ and seems to have left the city for The Marches soon afterwards, perhaps to deliver in person (as he was obliged to do by contract) his altarpiece of Saint Lucy to S. Floriano in Jesi. The painting is dated 1532, but this too may refer to early 1533.

It has not been possible to trace the date of Lucrezia’s birth, but her parents married in 1507 and her brothers Alessandro and Girolamo were born in 1514 and 1517. Lucrezia’s husband, Benedetto Giuseppe Pesaro, was born [page 80]on 12 August 1511, the son of Procurator Gerolamo Pesaro and Donata Donà. Two male children of this marriage are recorded: Gerolamo (b. 1536) and Francesco (b. 1537). The date of Lucrezia’s death has not been ascertained.³⁵

Jaffé’s proposal met with general acceptance, but it has recently been objected that the sitter ‘cannot be the noble Lucretia Valier’: ‘behaving with anything but aristocratic reserve, she wears provincial dress and may well be related to the painter.’³⁶ The lively pose is certainly remarkable in female portraiture, but it would be surprising whatever the social class of the sitter, since it is surely not the case that conventions of conduct for matrons or maidens – and still less conventions for the representation of such conduct – were notably more relaxed further down the social scale. If anything, this freedom might support the hypothesis that the sitter was a courtesan (which would make it a very ironic painting). In fact, the only portrait of a woman with a gesture of comparable force in a European painting of this period is Holbein’s Lais of Corinth, dated 1526.³⁷ And the best comparison for the bold address of the face is with the portraits by Palma Vecchio of beauties who are surely not virtuous.

As for the supposedly provincial character of the dress, there is a woman in a very similarly cut dress, striped green, gold and white, seated beside Dives in a famous painting by Bonifazio de’ Pitati of about 1535 in the Accademia, Venice. This surely suggests that at this date Venetians did expect to see fashionable women at palatial banquets dressed in such a way. It may, of course, be that Dives was keeping company with courtesans.³⁸ However, contemporary inventories reveal that the wardrobes of respectable Venetians, among them patrician ladies, included very similar garments. In a Priuli inventory of 1533, for example, we find a ‘sottana del raso naranzato lista de ormesin verde’ (‘a long dress of orange silk striped with green silk of another type’), another dress of crimson banded with green, and a ‘vardacuor’ (bodice) of scarlet striped with green silk.³⁹

There is evidence that Lotto painted a ‘meza figugra de una Lucretia’ in, or shortly before, 1540, when he paid for ‘ornamenti de noce’ – presumably a walnut frame – for such.⁴⁰ If he did paint a female member of his own family as Lucretia (and there is no evidence for this) it would have been around this date, yet the case for an earlier date for the National Gallery’s painting seems overwhelming. Mario d’Armano, whose mother was Lotto’s cousin, put Lotto up in his house in Treviso in the early 1540s. Lotto was deeply attached to Mario, whom he called his nephew (strictly, he was a distant cousin), and to Mario’s son and four daughters. These are the relatives with whom the painting has been supposed to be connected. One of the daughters was indeed called Lucrezia. She was a nun and Lotto gave her presents, including books of devotion and a painting of the Madonna.⁴¹

It is surely right to question the generally accepted notion that the sitter’s identity is Lucrezia Valier. The painting does not seem to have been classed as a family portrait when in the Pesaro Collection, which included paintings from many other collections. There were many other young patrician wives with this popular name.⁴²

Hans Ost proposed that the sitter was a courtesan, on the very dubious basis of an inscription on an old copy of the portrait in the Liechtenstein Collection (see below) identifying her as ‘einer Venezianischen grande puttana’, also on account of the bold negligence with which she treats her jewellery, and on the still more dubious grounds that she has a ‘yellow veil’.⁴³ It would have been extraordinary for a courtesan to allow herself to be depicted wearing the state‐imposed badge of prostitution, and this veil is not such a badge but rather an expensive accessory often encountered in wardrobes of the period – ‘uno fazuol over villeto con filetti doro da portar in corpo’ (‘a kerchief or little veil with gold threads for covering the body’, that is, for wearing over the shoulders), to quote one example.⁴⁴ Later in the century, laws were passed forbidding these in Venice.⁴⁵ As mentioned above, the force of both gesture and expression breaks with conventions for portraits of ladies, but it does seem to strain credulity to interpret the inscription ironically. One thing is clear from Lotto’s biographical record and his concern for his own family: he would not have found chastity a fit subject for levity. Berenson’s observation that he could not help ‘feeling that the artist was not persuaded of the lady’s sincerity’ and Gould’s Shakespearean footnote (‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks’) are rightly castigated as ‘idle speculation’ by two recent scholars, but they then proceed to propose that the picture may have been intended for female viewers.⁴⁶ It is as naïve to assume that a portrait of this kind was made for the sitter as it is to suppose that it reflects or betrays the sitter’s true nature.

The Story of Lucretia, Ancient and Modern

The story of Lucretia was familiar to most of educated Europe by the end of the fourteenth century; it had been told by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) in his De Claris Mulieribus, by Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400) in his Legend of Good Women of the 1380s (lines 1680–1885), and by John Gower (d. 1408) in his Confessio Amantis published in 1390 (VII, lines 4755–5130). The chief ancient sources followed by these and other modern authors were also very famous: Livy’s History of Rome (I, LVII, 4 – LX, 4) and, slightly later in date and presumably dependent, Ovid’s Fasti (II, 725–852).⁴⁷ Valerius Maximus accorded great prominence to Lucretia in the Dictorum et Factorum – she was the first example in the section De Pudicitia (VI, I, 1–2). Dante included her among the ancient heroes confined in Limbo (Inferno, IV, 128).

Lucretia lived in the early sixth century bc, at a time when Rome was at war with neighbouring city‐states. The ancient authors relate how a group of tipsy senior Roman officers left their camp to see how their wives were employed back at home. The sons of King Tarquin Superbus found their wives carousing, but Lucretia, the beautiful and virtuous consort of Collatinus, was discovered busy with her wool, surrounded by equally industrious handmaidens. Prince Sextus Tarquinius, infatuated by her, returned, escorted by only one attendant, and was hospitably received. In the dead of night he crept into his hostess’s room with a drawn sword and threatened her with death if she did not yield to him. This failed to impress her, but he then proposed to kill his slave as well and allege that [page 81]he had found them committing adultery. She was so disturbed by the prospect of posthumous dishonour that he was able to rape her. After the prince’s departure, Lucretia summoned her husband and father (in Livy’s account urging each to bring a trusted friend). In tears, she told them what had occurred. The men tried to console her, but she would have none of it and stabbed herself.

In Ovid’s version her dying words are: ‘The pardon that you grant I refuse myself.’ After her death, her husband’s friend Lucius Junius Brutus arrives on the scene and swears to avenge her. But Livy’s heroine is a woman of even stronger will, who has considered the impact of her death upon both Roman morality and politics. She herself urges the men to swear revenge on the royal family; her motive for suicide she adduces as a determination not to provide a precedent that might be cited as justification for mitigating the punishment of unchaste women. ‘It is for you to decide what he [Sextus Tarquinius] deserves; for my part, although I acquit myself from guilt I do not absolve myself from punishment; in time to come no unchaste woman will be able to cite my example as an excuse for living’ – ‘Nec ulla deinde impudica Lucretiae exemplo vivet’, the words which (excepting ‘deinde’) appear on the paper in Lotto’s painting.

These last words which Livy (and also, following him, Boccaccio) gives Lucretia are not easily translated. Shakespeare, in his Rape of Lucrece, renders them thus: ‘No, no’, quoth she, ‘no dame, hereafter living,
By my excuse shall claim excuse’s giving.’⁴⁸ This seems obscurely paradoxical rather than bluntly pragmatic. Henry Parker, Lord Morley, has ‘their shall never no one unchaste women lyve to take example by Lucres’,⁴⁹ and Paynter in his Palace of Pleasure has ‘For no unchast or ill woman, shall hereafter impute no dishonest act to Lucrece’.⁵⁰

Although both Lucretia’s husband and her father declare her to be blameless, her suicide saves them from having to live with a contaminated woman. The notions of family honour and blood pollution were as powerful in Boccaccio’s and Lotto’s times as they had been in Livy’s, and the significance of Lucretia’s example is lost on a society that does not share these values. Lotto’s painting is explicit on this point: the woman testifies that her chastity is as important as her life, and implicitly endorses the death penalty for adultery, or rather for the adulteress. The point is elaborated at length in the speech given to Lucretia by Matteo Bandello in his version of the story,⁵¹ and still more vividly and remarkably, and surely influentially, by Coluccio Salutati in his Declamatio Lucretiae, a monologue that enjoyed considerable celebrity in the fifteenth century and was first printed as the 427th epistle in the Epistolae of Aeneas Silvius in 1496. According to Salutati, Lucretia asks her husband how he can ever trust that she really prefers death to infamy if she does not kill herself, and why he cannot see that if she lives she must be infamous – polluted and perhaps impregnated. She adds that ‘if I spare adultery, some adultery will be found pleasing, and then adultery will be welcomed’, and thus, she implies, the whole social fabric endangered.⁵²

For all the authors so far mentioned, whether ancient or modern, Lucretia is an entirely worthy heroine. Chaucer not only describes her as a saint but cites Christ’s words:That in Israel, was wyd as is the lond,
That so gret feyth in al that he ne fond
As in a woman.⁵³ However, suicide was condemned by the church, and the ‘grete Austyn’, Saint Augustine, who, Chaucer informs us, had ‘gret compassioun / Of this Lucresse’,⁵⁴ in fact devoted a section of the first book of his City of God to contrasting her conduct unfavourably with that of Christian women raped in prison.⁵⁵

It might be claimed that those who venerated Lucretia in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were making allowances for the fact that she lived before the teaching of Christ. But not long after Lotto painted this picture, a fair young virgin, having been raped in the woods by a Ferrarese ‘camerier’ in the service of Lodovico Gonzaga, Bishop of Mantua, drowned herself in the River Oglio. The Bishop, although he could not have her body buried in consecrated ground, planned to erect a ‘sepolcro di bronzo’ for her upon the marble column in the piazza of Gazzuolo. Matteo Bandello, who was himself a Dominican friar, tells her story in a Novella dedicated to a cardinal with nothing but admiration for her courage.⁵⁶ The revival of interest in Lucretia (and surely also the huge popularity of her name) thus seems to suggest an attachment to a moral code that was not Christian – which is not to say that the contradiction could not be denied, or at least ignored. No priest is recorded as faltering at the font when bestowing this very pagan ‘Christian’ name, which was permitted since there was in fact a very obscure Saint Lucretia.

Lucretia in Fifteenth‐ and Sixteenth‐Century Art

During the second half of the fifteenth century the story of Lucretia enjoyed considerable popularity as a theme in Tuscan furniture paintings, sometimes in company with the story of Virginia, another Roman heroine.⁵⁷ In some of these paintings the emphasis is placed not on the rape or suicide of the heroine but on the oath of Brutus or his oration over her bier, when he stirred the people into revolt against the tyranny of the Tarquins, who were subsequently expelled from Rome, Brutus and Collatinus being elected as consuls to rule in their place. It may be that what mattered most to some Florentines was the anti‐tyrannical aspect of the story; the story of Virginia represented a parallel blow, but against a corrupt magistracy.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, given that such furniture paintings were made for newly wed couples and often explicitly allude to nuptial themes, it must also have been important that Lucretia was considered an inspiring model for wives.

In Siena in the early sixteenth century a type of furniture painting became popular in which groups of three virtuous heroines of antiquity were painted full length in vertical panels separated by pilasters to form a single horizontal spalliera unit above a chest, bench or bed. What seems to be the only example to have survived intact is attributed to Guidoccio Cozzarelli and features ‘Hippo Virgo Greca’, ‘Camilla Virgo [page 82][page 83]Volscor Regina’ and ‘Lucrezia Romana Castissima’.⁵⁹ Lucretia was painted in a panel of a similar format by Andrea del Brescianino in about 1517–18, apparently as part of a series with the virtues Hope and Charity and thus perhaps herself embodying a virtue.⁶⁰ A fragmentary panel of Lucretia by Domenico Beccafumi at Oberlin College (Kress Collection)⁶¹ must have belonged to such a trio of heroines, as surely did the beautiful painting by Sodoma (of about 1510) in the Kestner Museum, Hanover.⁶² In all these examples Lucretia is shown stabbing herself, or about to stab herself, but with no narrative context and usually without any witnesses (Andrea del Brescianino is an exception here), and in each case, apart from the painting by Cozzarelli, Lucretia exposes at least one breast in order to plunge her weapon into bare flesh.

Another painting of Lucretia by Sodoma (now untraced) is mentioned in a letter written by the artist to Francesco Gonzaga in 1518, and he is known to have painted one that was given by Agostino Chigi to Pope Leo X – a highly appreciated gift, since Sodoma was knighted by the Pope in consequence. Not only was this painting not one of a series of heroines, but according to Vasari it showed Lucretia completely nude.⁶³ Chigi must have known that the Pope, as Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, had composed a poem on a recently excavated antique marble statue that was believed to represent Lucretia. By the mid‐sixteenth century, when Aldrovandi made his survey of antiquities in Roman collections he identified half a dozen statues as representing her. It has been plausibly proposed that these must have been ancient sculptures of Amazons with one bare breast.⁶⁴ Perhaps connected with the antique sculptures of Lucretia is the drawing of her by Raphael, which was engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi. In this print (fig. 7), probably of about 1511–12, the heroine’s drapery, her pose, her one exposed breast and her hairstyle are all as antique as the Corinthian column behind and the altar beside her – the latter is inscribed (in Greek): ‘Better to die than to live in dishonour.’⁶⁵ There is no close connection with the statues of Amazons, but the foot raised on a block is highly suggestive of a sculptural source.

Marcantonio’s print, which was pirated at least once, was very likely known to Lotto. Originally he placed the heroine in the drawing in a very similar position, her head in profile to the right, gripping the dagger in the same way, with her left arm also outstretched and with a Corinthian capital above and to the left of her head. In his final version she is more nearly nude, with more windswept drapery and her hair more dishevelled than in the print, recalling the painting of Lucretia [page 84]in the Royal Collection that was attributed in the early seventeenth century to Titian.⁶⁶ It is interesting that, when he was closely dependent on a print, Lotto concealed the fact by depicting the figure in colour, but when working more independently he felt able to produce a fictive print or drawing.

Lucretia’s nudity is a notable feature of Lotto’s version – and of Sodoma’s painting for Pope Leo (according to Vasari) – but she is also depicted nude in the work of artists from all over Europe: in a drawing by Dürer of 1508 (and again in a painting by him of 1518);⁶⁷ in an engraving by Jacopo Francia of about 1511;⁶⁸ in one by Lucas van Leyden of about 1514 (fig. 8),⁶⁹ in which the heroine’s long, loose tresses fly about behind her as they do in Lotto’s drawing; and in many subsequent prints – by Barthel Beham and Altdorfer, among others. Two scholars have recently proposed that the woman in Lotto’s painting might herself be the artist of the drawing, and that this would explain why the Roman matron is depicted in a ‘heroic mode’, in defiance of ‘current trends’,⁷⁰ but the drawing is clearly in the same mode as Lucas’s engraving. This print seems to have inspired sculptures of the nude heroine in boxwood (fig. 9) and bronze (in the Brunswick Museum).⁷¹ An equivalent Italian sculpture is the miniature high‐relief marble Lucretia with lapis lazuli inlay which is inscribed CASTIS EXEMPLAR UXORIBVS (‘a model of chastity for the married’), by a sculptor working in north‐east Italy in the 1520s.⁷² It is easy to suppose that these engravings and small sculptures of the nude heroine had an erotic appeal for their owners, but the inscription on the marble suggests a moral purpose, and the presence of two small boxwood carvings of Lucretia (one apparently in the round, the other a relief with shutters) in the collection of Margaret of Austria (at Malines in 1524) would be surprising if such works had been made for male delectation.⁷³ For most of the artists involved it was surely the case that the proper ‘language’ in which to express sublime heroism was derived from ancient sculpture, in which nudity or near nudity was the convention. For Lotto’s depiction of Lucretia the nudity had the advantage of making a clear distinction between his sitter and the Roman heroine: they belong to different epochs and to different genres.

It is worth observing, however, that in Ovid’s account of Lucretia’s death she is concerned for her modesty even as she sinks to the ground – ‘tunc quoque iam moriens ne non procumbat honeste, / respicit; haec etiam cura cadentis erat’ (‘Even as she died she was careful to collapse in a decent manner; such was her concern even as she fell’) (ii, 833–4) – and Chaucer has her anxious ‘lest that hir fet or such thyng lay bare’.⁷⁴ Whatever the motives of the artists who represented Lucretia entirely nude, the half‐length images of her exposing her breasts as she thrust or prepared to thrust a sword or dagger into herself were not, we suspect, designed to inspire elevated sentiments in those who owned them. That women themselves might sometimes use the image of Lucretia other than as a model of Chastity is clear from the letter to Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, sealed with a ‘Lucrece’ and including the lines: ‘But silence, like a Lucrece knife / With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore.’⁷⁵

No other novel subject in art enjoyed a more remarkable success throughout Europe in the early decades of the sixteenth century: there are examples by Gossaert (known only in copies), by Joos van Cleve, by an artist in the circle of Quentin Massys, by the Master of the Half Figures, by Pieter Coecke, by the Master of the Holy Blood, and in Italy by Sodoma (additional to the full‐length paintings by him already mentioned).⁷⁶ Many of these paintings carry the inscription ‘Satus est mori quam indecore vivere’ (‘better to die than live with dishonour’). Many seem originally to have been paired with, even attached to, paintings of the penitent Magdalen – this was the case with one of at least five paintings of Lucretia in the possession of King Henry VIII by 1542, and the pairing has been noted in other English collections.⁷⁷ Neither the edifying text nor the saintly company need convince us of their high moral purpose. On the other hand, an erotic intention cannot have been blatant, since one of these paintings, a ‘Lucresse’ wearing a fur robe and gold chain, together with the boxwood sculptures already mentioned, was in the collection of Margaret of Austria.⁷⁸

Such paintings were presumably for private devotion or delectation and they might have been considered scandalous in a less private setting. Thus Cardinal Bernardo Clesio, Bishop of Trent, wrote from Ratisbon in July 1532 – a date close to that of Lotto’s painting – to express his dismay that among the frescoes being painted in his palace at Trent were certain figures deficient in that decency and decorum which was proper (‘quella venustade et proportione che doveviano’), and in particular he had heard reports of a Lucretia painted opposite the garden stairs, where special care should be taken because it was more public – ‘quanto il loco è piu publico e in prospetto di tutti’.⁷⁹

Two other portraits of the early sixteenth century which feature Lucretia are known to me, both from north of the Alps and both of male sitters. One is a portrait of a man with a lovesick expression, his hand on his heart, attributed to (and certainly fairly close to) Jan Gossaert,⁸⁰ which had on the reverse in grisaille a painting, dated 1534, of a woman, half‐length, wearing a very contemporary bonnet, exposing her breasts with one hand and preparing to drive a sword into her chest with the other (the pictures – figs 10 and 11 – have since been separated). This Lucretia is perhaps hard to take seriously. The other is a half‐length portrait of a man in an attitude of earnest devotion, originally forming a diptych with the Virgin and Child, a work which can be confidently attributed to Jan van Scorel⁸¹ and dated about 1530 (fig. 12). On its reverse there is a full‐length Lucretia almost as nude as Lotto’s and also very evidently speaking as she supports with both hands a sword upon which she intends to fall (fig. 13). Given the original structure of this painting, it is clear that the diptych with Lucretia on the other side would once have opened to reveal the Virgin and Child within, so that in the [page 86]mind of Jan van Scorel, or rather of his patron, no less than in those of Chaucer and surely Lotto, Lucretia was regarded as something like a saint, and the points made by Saint Augustine about the pagan values she embodied were disregarded.

Lotto’s Portrait in the Pesaro Collection, and the Carnegie and Holford Collections

NG 4256 is very likely to be the Donna con ritratto di Lucrezia in mano, with the dimensions 2:9 × 3:3 (Venetian feet and inches), that was classed as a ‘bella copia’ after Giorgione and given a valuation of 88 lire in an inventory of the paintings in the Ca Pesaro, Venice, compiled by Pietro Edwards and Francesco Maggiotto in October 1797. It must seem surprising that the painting was regarded as a copy, but it is the only copy qualified as ‘bella’ and the valuation is higher than that given to the other copies: it is the same as that put on a small ceiling painting ascribed to the school of Pittoni, a bacchanal of putti by Padovanino, and the Virgin and Child with Saint John and a Donor by Leandro Bassano.⁸² Some other valuations are of interest for comparative purposes: the double portrait of patrician boys attributed to Titian at 528 lire⁸³ and a Lot and his Daughter, also attributed to Titian, at 6,600 lire – the most valuable item in the collection.⁸⁴ There is good evidence that the leading connoisseurs of north Italy at this date, such as Giovanni Maria Sasso, were well aware of Lotto’s paintings,⁸⁵ but this one was not then recognised. As explained elsewhere (p. 354), the gallery of paintings had been formed by the family in the seventeenth century. It is likely that many of them were obscured by dirt and discoloured varnish.

The inventory had been compiled for Pietro and Giovanni Pesaro, probably in connection with the provisional government’s plan to confiscate the possessions of their brother Francesco, a procurator of San Marco and former ambassador of the Republic, who had sided with the Austrians. The family was saved from disaster by the Austrians the following year, but Francesco died soon afterwards, in 1799. Pietro, the last survivor of the three brothers, sold the family medallic museum in May 1820 and probably began to dispose of some of the paintings around that time – a batch of 24 were offered in July 1831 in London, where Pietro died.⁸⁶

On 26 July 1828 the Abate Celotti, a leading Venetian dealer (for whom see pp. 363–4), offered the Lotto as an original by Giorgione to the canny Scottish dealer James Irvine, then of Via della Chiarica del Buffala in Rome. The painting was then in Milan. That winter Irvine visited Celotti in Venice and on 5 November he wrote to his client Sir William Forbes that ‘the Giorgione’ was still in Milan – ‘I believe in pawn’ – and that Celotti wanted 500 louis for it. Celotti had it taken to Venice, where on 13 November Irvine agreed to pay 300 louis. ‘Finding it the only genuine picture, perhaps, of this very scarce master I ever met with on sale, I agreed to take it on condition of paying for it at Milan,’ he informed Sir William’s son John a week later. Over that winter he had it restored by Giuseppe Guizzardi at Palazzo Ceneri, Bologna, where he reported in a letter of 3 January 1829 that it attracted much attention as ‘a capital and rare performance’.⁸⁷

In June 1854 the Lotto portrait was included in The Works of Ancient Masters, a loan exhibition of miscellaneous old master paintings at the British Institution in London. It was shown in the North Room as no. 46: ‘A Venetian Lady’ by ‘Giorgione’, the property of Sir J. Carnegie Bart. It must have attracted the attention of Robert Holford or his advisers, and in the accounts section of the diary of the owner (who had by now become 9th Earl of Southesk) on 9 July 1855 a receipt of £850 from Mr Holford for the Giorgione and a Rembrandt is recorded.⁸⁸ Unfortunately it is not known when the painting had been acquired by the Carnegie family – or, indeed, whether it was acquired by the 9th Earl (1827–1905) or by his father Sir James Carnegie, the 5th Baronet (1799–1849).

The 9th Earl certainly bought Italian paintings both before and after 1855, making acquisitions from the English artist and dealer William Spence and the Lombardi Collection in Florence and from the Revd Davenport Bromley. His father had been buying in Italy in the 1820s and 1830s, when, as we have seen, the painting was on the market, and it is perhaps more likely that the 9th Earl would have disposed of his father’s acquisitions than that he would have traded in his own. The collection kept at Kinnaird Castle, Brechin, was a large one – 115 old master paintings are recorded on a list of October 1942 in the National Gallery’s archive – but it was considerably depleted by sales in the 1940s and 1950s.⁸⁹

Lotto’s portrait was one of the treasures of the Holford Collection (for an account of which see pp. 367–70) and it hung for many years in Dorchester House, Holford’s London home.

The version of the painting in the Liechtenstein Collection was recognised by Eastlake in 1859 as a Lotto, and the Holford painting was attributed to Lotto by Crowe and Cavalcaselle in 1871.⁹⁰ Holford himself appears to have accepted the picture’s changed status, since he allowed it to be shown as a Lotto at the Winter Exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1887.⁹¹ As is discussed on p. 367, the collection was full of over‐ambitious attributions to the great Venetians.

The Lotto, together with the whole Holford Collection, was inherited by Robert Holford’s son, Sir George Lindsay Holford. After his death in 1926 the collections were sold, the Lotto fetching 22,000 guineas (£23,100) on 15 July 1927. The under‐bidder, Captain Duveen, was said not to have known that he was in contest with the National Gallery, which had obtained contributions both from the National Art Collections Fund and from Major Rex Benson and his brothers – nephews of Sir George and residuary legatees of his estate.

Rex was the son of Robert Benson, son‐in‐law of the founder of the collection and himself owner of one of the finest collections of Italian pictures ever formed in this country. Robert Benson, who had written the account of the Holford Collection published in 1924 and had organised its exhibition by the Burlington Fine Art Club in the winter of 1921–2, was then a Trustee of the National Gallery. He may have been somewhat ashamed of the fact that he had just disposed of his own collection en bloc for a colossal sum to Joseph Duveen without offering any of the pictures to the Gallery first.⁹²

There was, in fact, one notable Lotto in Robert Benson’s collection, the Susanna and the Elders now in the Contini‐Bonacossi Collection in Florence, and this was among the three paintings from which Duveen permitted the Director and the Trustees to select one. On 19 July the Trustees decided to accept Correggio’s Christ taking Leave of his Mother, and if any of them had been tempted by the Lotto, they were no doubt influenced in the decision not to opt for it by the fact that they had purchased a finer example of his work only four days before.⁹³

Provenance

See above. Probably the painting in Palazzo Pesaro, Venice, by October 1797; with the Abate Celotti by July 1828, and acquired by James Irvine, November 1828. Certainly owned by Sir James Carnegie (9th Earl of Southesk) by July 1855, when bought by Robert Holford. Sold by the heirs of his son, Sir George Holford, at Christie’s on 15 July 1927 (lot 68), where bought for the National Gallery with contributions from the National Art Collections Fund and from Major Rex Benson and his brothers.

Version

One old copy of the painting is recorded. It was catalogued in the collection in Vienna of the Prince of Liechtenstein in 1855 (no. 44, a copy after Palma Vecchio, 89 × 86 cm), but no longer in 1931.⁹⁴ If this copy enjoyed some prominence in the eighteenth century, it would explain why the version in Palazzo Pesaro (see above) was described as a copy. Eastlake, in Vienna on 3 September 1859, noted that it ‘was called Giorgione but certainly Lorenzo Lotto’.⁹⁵

Exhibitions and Loans

Washington 1997–8, National Gallery of Art ; Bergamo 1998, Accademia Carrara .

Frame

The painting is shown in a gilt cassetta frame (fig. 14) of lapped construction, carved at the sight edge with simplified leaves running out from ribboned centres and at the outer moulding with a tongue‐and‐leaf pattern. The frieze is carved at the corners with three stylised leaves, and at the centres with eight‐petalled flowers, in hollow relief. The flat between these features is decorated with a regularly winding tendril with leaves of five or six lobes filling each of the curves. The tendril is defined negatively against a densely punched ground. Much of the original burnished water‐gilding survives.

Frames of this type are associated with Bologna and are generally dated to the seventeenth century. The wooden altarpiece frames still in situ there (for example, those of c. 1620 in S. Salvatore), and framed altarpieces removed to the Pinacoteca (for example, Guercino’s Vestizione di S. Guglielmo of 1620 from S. Gregorio), confirm the connection.⁹⁶

A frame of similar type was purchased by the National Gallery in 1989, using the Christie’s Furniture Fund, for Guercino’s Dead Christ Mourned by Two Angels (NG 22). Another, once on a Boltraffio (NG 728), is in the Gallery’s store,⁹⁷ as is an exceptionally rich example of the type, with a brocade pattern against the punched ground of the frieze and crisp leaves of varied length on the knull, which was once around Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast (NG 6350).⁹⁸

A memorandum compiled by Cecil Gould identifies the frame catalogued here as a ‘Hendy frame’ (alluding to Philip Hendy, who was the Gallery’s tenth director, 1968–73), but reframing of the painting is mentioned in the Annual Report for June 1962–December 1964. It probably replaced the Holford frame, which appears to have been a pierced frame of the Palazzo Pitti type. Lord Duveen, perhaps as a gesture to compensate for his firm’s bidding against the Gallery at the Holford sale, offered a new frame. This would seem to have been one with a pulvinated and pierced foliate frieze, gilt but with red showing in the hollows, of the type made for him and other dealers by Feruccio Vannoni in Florence. Examples of such frames are very common on sixteenth‐century paintings, especially Venetian ones, sold to North American collectors in the first half of the twentieth century.⁹⁹ The original overture was made by Duveen’s Paris office on 30 December 1927: ‘Sir Joseph intends to reframe the Lotto … we are therefore sending you herewith a maquette.’ It was reported that W.G. Constable liked the sample, but Holmes did not think that the picture needed reframing (or was reluctant to incur obligations or to encourage unsolicited interventions of this kind) and the matter was dropped.¹⁰⁰

Appendix
THE SCUFIA, OR CAP

During the sixteenth century, and especially between 1515 and 1545, women in Italy were depicted wearing caps or bonnets which were known in Venice as scufie or scuffie (with many variants of the spelling).¹⁰¹ These were often fashioned with cloth of gold or involved gold and silver thread as well as silk and velvet. Curls or strands, apparently of fleece and also of card, could be employed.¹⁰² Jewels often served as a central ornament in the front, as in the one worn by the woman in Lotto’s double portrait in the Prado, Madrid, of 1523, and these are also mentioned in inventories. But on 19 March 1530 laws were passed in Venice permitting the use of gold and silver in scufie while forbidding pearls or other jewels.¹⁰³ Lotto’s sitter is perhaps making a show with economical materials, but others disregarded the ruling or at best substituted paste jewels. Thus in Tommaso Michiel’s inventory of 1532 his wife’s wardrobe includes a ‘sconfio del filo bianco et doro con uno croseta in fronte di diamanti falso come disino con tre perle’ (‘a cap of white and gold threads with a cross in front said to be of false diamonds with three pearls’).¹⁰⁴ We find that Lucretia, the widow of a Venetian bookseller, had four caps, all of gold – one with white silk and another with green (‘tabi verdi’).¹⁰⁵ These colours, together with black, seem to have been the most popular.¹⁰⁶ Scufie were, however, not always an item of luxury dress, and we can find references to them as made of ‘tela’ (cloth) and of ‘bombaso’ (cotton),¹⁰⁷ and in one inventory there are twelve ‘per la notte’ – presumably common nightcaps.¹⁰⁸ The luxury ones were not worn only by patrician ladies. The widow of the painter Boccaccino [page 88]is recorded as owning a scufia of gold thread and silk in the inventory made after his death in 1525.¹⁰⁹ In 1528 the wife of a soap merchant called Domenico Galimberto had two in her wardrobe,¹¹⁰ and in 1529 Palma Vecchio’s niece Margarita had a ‘scufia strica doro’.¹¹¹ Equivalent caps for men are discussed in the entry for Moretto’s portrait (NG 1025). The changing shape of the scufia can be charted in Lotto’s portraits: when he painted Lucina Brembati in about 1520 they were very large and dropped behind the head, perhaps reflecting their origin as bags for the hair, but more than twenty years later, when he painted Laura da Pola in 1543 and the wife of Giovanni della Volta (NG 1047) in 1546–7, they had become relatively modest and tightly constructed.

By the end of the century when Cesare Vecellio published his book of costume he used the term scuffia for a plain cap of white cotton worn by widows to conceal their hair and as a synonym for the small round beret worn by French matrons. He used it also in descriptions of bygone fashions for headdresses of more inflated form, but together with another word, balzo (or sbalzo). Thus Venetian ladies used to wear a ‘beretta, o sbalzo di rame coperta di una scuffia lavorata di sea & oro’ (‘a beret or sbalzo of copper covered with a scuffia worked in silk and gold’) and outdoors ‘in capo un balzo fatto di fila d’oro a modo di un ghirlanda tondo’ (‘on the head a balzo made of gold thread in the fashion of a round garland’), and men too then wore ‘un balzo come quello delle donne fatto di rame e rotondo a quisa di diadema’ (‘a balzo like that of the ladies, made of copper and round in the form of a diadem’). From this we may deduce that some, at least, of the headdresses were held in place by a wire frame.¹¹²

Notes