Tarquin and Lucretia After a model attributed to Hubert Gerhard Netherlandish 1605–10 In the late sixteenth century the innovative style and phenomenal success of the sculptor Giambologna (see entry no.　30) attracted many artists to Florence to join his large workshop. Two sculptors born, as was that master, in the Low Countries — Hubert Gerhard, from s’ Hertogenbosch, and Adriaen de Vries, from The Hague — absorbed his manner but transformed it into distinctive idioms that they carried back to northern Europe. De Vries (see entry no.　32) was peripatetic, occupied by commissions in Milan, Tu

Tarquin and Lucretia After a model attributed to Hubert Gerhard Netherlandish 1605–10 In the late sixteenth century the innovative style and phenomenal success of the sculptor Giambologna (see entry no.　30) attracted many artists to Florence to join his large workshop. Two sculptors born, as was that master, in the Low Countries — Hubert Gerhard, from s’ Hertogenbosch, and Adriaen de Vries, from The Hague — absorbed his manner but transformed it into distinctive idioms that they carried back to northern Europe. De Vries (see entry no.　32) was peripatetic, occupied by commissions in Milan, Turin, Augsburg, and Prague; Gerhard worked mainly in the South German cities of Augsburg, Innsbruck, and Munich. Both mastered the medium of bronze, working often at a large or lifesize scale but also producing statuettes. This Tarquinius and Lucretia, of which a number of versions exist, intersects with aspects of each sculptor’s style, and over the years its attribution has shifted back and forth between In the Museum’s bronze group the struggling figures’ tightly interwoven limbs express the tension and violence of the historical subject, the rape of a Roman matron, which prompted her suicide (see entry no.　50). Hubert Gerhard’s large-scale sculpture Mars, Venus, and Cupid (ca.　1585 – 90, Schloss Kirchheim, near Augsburg), and a smaller, variant bronze of the subject he produced some two decades later (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) are closely related to the present work in their composition, especially in the way the man’s leg is slung over the woman’ On this basis, the scholarly world concurred that Gerhard must have devised the Tarquinius and Lucretia. Recent reappraisals not only of Gerhard’s work but also of De Vries’s have put the authorship of this bronze group at issue. In 1998 Frits Scholten found the movement of the figures coordinated in　one direction to be unlike the complex, back-and-forth poses of

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