Portrait of a Woman Inspired by Lucretia, c.1530/33 by Lorenzo Lotto
Canvas Print - 23321-LOL

Her stare arrives first – direct, appraising, without a flicker of the demure downcast gaze convention demanded of Cinquecento women. She stands wedged between the corner of an armchair and a draped table, her body turned three-quarters toward us while her left hand thrusts out an ink drawing of Lucretia plunging a dagger into her own breast. Her right hand hovers at her waist, fingers loosely curled, pointing without quite pointing at the small paper on the crimson cloth. That paper carries Lucretia's last words in Latin, roughly rendered: no unchaste woman will live using Lucretia as her excuse. It is a fierce sentence to hold in one's hand.

Lorenzo Lotto has dressed her formidably. The sleeves alone are a small drama – slashed panels of burnt orange satin banded with viridian green, puffed and split to reveal ivory linen at the elbow, wrists finished with delicate frilled cuffs. Her bodice runs deep emerald, laced with orange ribbon, and from her throat hangs a gold pendant with two putti and cornucopias, a bridal jewel of the sort a Venetian bride might have received. A gold band circles her finger. Blossoms are threaded through her ribboned cap, that scufia woven partly from human hair which so precisely dates her to the early 1530s.

On the table lies a yellow wallflower – common in Italian meadows, sometimes exchanged between lovers – and the empty chair beside her seems to wait for someone. A husband, one might imagine, whose absence gives her permission to speak this loudly.

What fascinates me is how much colour Lotto suppressed to arrive at this final tension. The background reads grey now, but it once carried broad vertical stripes of pink, lilac and blue; the tablecloth was striped in blue, traces of which still glimmer at the paper's edge if you look carefully. The Lucretia drawing itself covers an earlier, coloured figure whose arm was raised the other way. You can still catch the faint bluish ground bleeding through the ink, giving the sheet the ghostly authority of a print pulled from a plate. These pentimenti are not failures; they are Lotto thinking on the panel, stripping ornament until the sitter's face and gesture do all the work.

The horizontal format was something he had begun to favour, usually for men, because it made room for objects and inscriptions – for narrative. Here that innovation lets a woman argue her own case. Compared with Titian's languid Venetian beauties of the same decade, this portrait feels almost confrontational, closer in spirit to the psychological unease Lotto brought to his male sitters.

Standing before Portrait of a Woman Inspired by Lucretia at the National Gallery in London, one senses the faint chill of a room where a decision has already been made. She is not asking us to admire her. She is asking whether we understand.