Portrait of a Woman Inspired by Lucretia, c.1530/33 Lorenzo Lotto (c.1480-1556)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Lorenzo Lotto also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Portrait of a Woman Inspired by Lucretia is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

After adding your artwork to the shopping cart, you will be able to check the delivery price using the Estimate Shipping and Tax tool.

The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

Her left hand does not merely hold the sheet; it presents evidence. On it, Lucretia twists toward the dagger, all Roman tragedy reduced to a pale, fluttering drawing. Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Woman Inspired by Lucretia, painted around 1530/33 and now in the National Gallery, London, is a portrait that behaves almost like a scene in court. The sitter points, displays, and judges.

Everything about her is costly. Orange satin swells at the sleeves, cut by bands of deep green that catch the light like polished leaves. A darker green bodice grips the torso, while cords and a gold pendant fall from the breast; its little putti and cornucopias belong to the language of marriage. Around her head sits a ribboned scufia, part coiffure, part ornament, with pale flowers nestling in the crimped, golden-brown mass. Yet the luxury is not softening. It has weight. One can almost hear the dry rustle of silk as she shifts her arm.

Lotto gives her a room with very little air in it. Grey presses behind her, the table comes forward, and the empty chair at the left is too deliberate to be mere furniture. Perhaps it stands for the absent husband, but it also feels like a witness box left vacant. On the red cloth lie a small yellow wallflower, possibly a lover’s token, and a paper bearing Lucretia’s severe final thought: that her death will leave no excuse for unchaste women. This is a brutal moral world, and Lorenzo Lotto refuses to tidy it up for us.

Look at her face. Not victim, not ornament, not a dutiful Renaissance bride lowering her gaze. She meets us with a level, almost sceptical intelligence. Compared with Titian’s grand Venetian women, whose beauty can seem enveloped in atmosphere, Lotto’s sitter is sharper, more argumentative. Her right hand presses near the folds of her dress, while the left extends the drawing outward, making the body itself a hinge between private marriage and public virtue.

Small oddities matter here. A faint coolness lingers around the paper and flower, where earlier blue survives beneath later paint; we know, too, that the background once carried pinks, violets, and blues rather than this sober grey. Knowing that, the present darkness feels chosen, or at least accepted, as a moral weather. The ink figure of Lucretia is strangely theatrical, nearly a prop, and that is the unexpected sting: the sitter seems less inspired by Lucretia than determined to control how Lucretia will be used.

Lorenzo Lotto was unusually alert to inner friction. In this portrait he turns chastity, marriage, name, and self-display into a single taut performance. Stand before it, and the room feels cold, the silence exacting. She is still pointing.