account of the story, and although this is the only painting of a historical subject from Titian's last years, his mythological subjects are also all covered by Ovid. Lucretia wears her jewellery to bed, and Tarquin's clothes are modern and rich. Titian's signature is on the slipper at lower right. The painting has been trimmed on all sides, but it is not known when or by how much. The subject was one of a group showing women from legend or the Bible who were powerless, or only able to escape their situation through suicide, such as Susanna, Dido of Carthage and Verginia. These formed a counterpoint to, or sub-group of, the set of subjects known as the Power of Women, showing female violence against, or domination of, men. These were often depicted by the same artists, and especially popular in Northern Renaissance art. The story of Esther lay somewhere between these two extremes. Influences and copies Either Titian or, as is now thought more likely, his brother Francesco Vecellio (c. 1490-1559/60), had already painted the suicide, as "an elegant dance movement in a landscape", some 50 years earlier (now Royal Collection). Titian, or perhaps Palma Vecchio, had also painted a typical portrait of Lucretia holding a knife, but with the untypical addition of a male figure in deep shadow, either Tarquin or her husband, standing just behind her. This comes from 1514–15 and is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, with an early copy in the Royal Collection. Titian's new composition can be shown to have been influenced by Northern prints, and was itself immediately popularized by an engraving by Cornelius Cort, dated 1571, which is "evidently from some authorized modeletto". This reversed the composition (in a mirror image, as print copies naturally do) but another print published in Rome, presumably pirated, copied the print and so reversed the composition again to restore the original. The exact poses of the individual figures also have precedents, with Lucretia perhaps drawing from the female figure (Dirce) in the famous Roman sculpture known as the Farnese Bull. The composition evolved as Titian worked on it, as is shown by x-rays of the painting, and a workshop copy now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux (illustrated here), which reflects an earlier composition where the hand with the dagger is much lower, and threatening to thrust upwards not down. Here Lucretia's head is also