The Roman patrician lady Lucretia killed herself after being raped by the son of the King of Rome, an act that brought about the fall of the monarchy and the proclamation of the Republic in 510 B. C.

Hercules used his bow when firing at the Stymphalian birds, the destruction of which was the sixth of his Labors. These voracious creatures ate human flesh, had brazen claws, wings and beaks and used their feathers as arrows. Their habitat was a lake near Stymphalus in Arcadia. On hearing of the task that Hercules had been allotted, Athena provided the hero with a brass rattle, by the noise of which he startled the birds, killing them one by one with his arrows as they flew away. In the drawing,

The composition, which shows the three Theological Virtues, was probably made with a painted composition in mind, though no such work survives. As Pérez Sánchez has argued, the style indicates a date around 1550-60, when the artist was still working in Genoa. Cambiaso treated the subject again at the end of his career in one of the frescoes in the choir of the Escorial, though the design of his latter composition is radically different from that of the present sheet.

The encounter between Hercules and the Amazons, the ninth of his Labors, arose from his assignment to seize the girdle of Queen Hippolyte of the Amazons. Admete, the daughter of Eurystheus, had expressed a desire to possess it, and Hercules therefore set off on a mission to satisfy her desire. The girdle was the ensign of the Queen´s power and she had received it as a present from Ares. The Amazons were a race of warrior women, who had established their own kingdom in Asia Minor and were particu

The fantastic creature in the present sheet resembles those appearing as crests of helmets in some ornamental suits of armor manufactured in Northern Italy in the middle of the sixteenth century, particularly Milan. A good example is that in the form of a siren (part woman, part bird) on top of the helmet in the armor of Alessandro Farnesse preserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. A 1132). Datable around 1576-80, this exceptional garniture is thought to be by the Milanese armorer,

The album page on which the drawing is laid has been cut down. A lioness in a similar pose appears at the feet of a standing Bacchus in a drawing in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. no. KTP II, no. 132).

Although sadly much corroded, the drawing is of high quality and the handling compatible with Cambiaso´s autograph drawings. Fortitude is one of the three Theological Virtues, whose attributes are a column and a lion.This and a handful of other drawings by Cambiaso and his School, which do not belong to the Cambiaso Album, described below, have various provenances. Only three appear to have belonged to the same eighteenth-century Italian collector, since all three are laid down onto a paper back

As related in the Homeric story, Queen Niobe, the wife of Amphion, King of Thebes, was the mother of six sons and six daughters, of whom she was greatly proud. She deemed herself superior to Latona, who had given birth to only two -Apollo and Artemis- both sired by Jupiter, to whom Latona was married before Juno. Indignant at Niobe´s presumptuousness, Apollo and Artemis slew all of her children with arrows. In the drawing, Apollo and Artemis are seen in clouds at the top of the composition, with

This drawing may possibly be by Cambiaso himself, though stains and other damages to the sheet impair assessment of its quality. A studio version of the composition, in reverse and in pen and brown ink only, is in the Louvre (inv. no. 9229).

The drawing belongs to a collection, mostly by Cambiaso´s workshop, formerly preserved in an old album. According to Renaissance tradition, a painter needed to prove himself as an inventor of figure compositions: these were not the casual groupings of scenes from everyday life that might take his fancy, but the great actions of human history, from the Bible, mythology, ancient history and literature. The painter, like the poet, needed to stir human emotion, which he did by interpreting tradition