Episodes from the story of Lucretia: a cassone panel

The Master of Charles III of Durazzo is named after the cassone front of the Conquest of Naples in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. no. 07.120.1). Everett Fahy (‘Florence and Naples: a Cassone Panel in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’, Hommages à Michel Laclotte, Milan, 1994, pp. 231-43), argued that the New York panel was ordered soon after September 1382, when Charles III, who had entered Naples on 28 June 1381, claimed the crown of Hungary, making that panel the earliest surviving datable cassone front. As King of Naples, Charles quickly formed an alliance with Florence, which may explain his employment of a Florentine painter. Miklós Boskovits, who initially assigned a small group of panels including that in New York to his Master of Cracow, subsequently named the master after the New York picture, associating with it a number of other secular works. His importance as the leading cassone painter of the late fourteenth century has long been recognised. This panel, which was in the collection of Ferdinando Strozzi in the nineteenth century, shows the first part of the story of Lucretia – it would originally have been paired with a cassone showing her demise. Here Tarquin, the son of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome, and the governor Collatinus, husband of Lucretia, are shown, on the left, debating the virtuous nature of their wives with their companions, as they feast. They then set off to visit each of their wives, shown here in the middle section; none was more virtuous than Lucretia, whom they discovered at home sewing with her maids, seen on the far right. The companion cassone would have shown her eventual suicide, after being raped by Tarquin. The story of Lucretia meant she became a paragon of female virtue and fortitude.

We are grateful to Lorenzo Sbaraglio for confirming the attribution on the basis of photographs.