The style of Botticelli’s paintings from the last decade of his life, beginning with such works as the Tragedy of Lucretia, is dramatically different from that of his earliest career. The gentle calligraphy of his earlier drawing and the balletic grace of his figure types, derived from Filippo Lippi but perfected in his own unmistakable idiom, have given way to hard, almost engraved lines and crabbed, intensely over-wrought figures. The delicate veils of color that warmed the atmosphere and created a sense of open space as well as of surfaces and textures in paintings like the Chigi Madonna, have become adamantine blocks of bright, unmodulated tone, lending a cold clarity to a light that defines figures and architecture with somewhat inconsistent results. In part this change may be attributable to Botticelli's shift to the fashionable medium of oil paints, a shift he was never comfortable making, having been one of the century's greatest technicians in the use of tempera paints. Scholars have also seen in the stiffening of Botticelli’s late style proof of Vasari’s claim that the artist was physically debilitated at the end of his life: “Finally, having become old, unfit for work, and helpless, he was obliged to go on crutches, being unable to stand upright, and so died, after long illness and decrepitude.” Whether this story be fact or fiction, Botticelli’s late works betray no perceptible diminution in his power of expression or in his compositional genius. The Tragedy of Lucretia is certainly one of the great masterpieces of Florentine painting from the last years of probably its greatest period, the golden age of the fifteenth century.

Source: Laurence Kanter (1997), "The Tragedy of Lucretia," in Eye of the Beholder, edited by Alan Chong et al. (Boston: ISGM and Beacon Press, 2003): 69.

Purchased in 1894 from the Earl of Ashburnham, through Berenson.