What is our response upon viewing an effectively conceived and executed visual representation? Writing on narrative painting, Leonardo da Vinci states that if the work

represents terror, fear, flight, sorrow, weeping, and lamentation; or pleasure, joy, laughter and similar conditions, the minds of those who view it ought to make their limbs move so that they seem to find themselves in the same situation which the figures in the narrative painting represent.¹¹ (italics mine)

As an audience before the Troy painting Lucrece herself does this, and more. We need to observe, however tritely, that she must have walked by this artwork, glanced at it, and doubtless viewed it at length on countless occasions during the years she lived at Collatium. Yet on this occasion she deliberately seeks it out. Faced by a representation-as-event, one that exerts a gradually intensifying, cathecting hold on her, she experiences herself mimicing and voicing the physiological and emotional states of its varied characters. In doing so she temporarily steps into the representation. Not surprisingly, the meaning she makes of herself in the painting is to a considerable degree determined by the remembered image of the violence of her rape—an image, some critics argue, unduly "stimulated" by her own language.

"Narratives," as R. Rawdon Wilson claims, can "catch, hold, illude, and frequently delude their narratees."¹² The painting-as-narrator tells Lucrece her own story. Moreover, being "caught" by an ostensible illusion can work no less genuine a transformation on a viewer/ listener than that worked by a real sight. The Trojan figures she moves among open up and frame Lucrece's own narrative, that is the internal struggle between the two poles of violence she endures, rape and suicide. The gaze of the text-as-narrator at the painting (over Lucrece's shoulder) directs, constructs, and contains her (and our) gaze.

Let us take a brief, initial "wide-angle" look at the sweep of narration, Apostrophic address and prosopopoeic voice that speak in this scene of the "skillful painting." First the narrator throws his peripatetic, focalizing eye here and there over the painting in a cinematic manner—panning, cutting, tracking in and back, tilting—that gradually escalates. The linguistic effect of installing vision in this way intensifies the very reality (not the realism) of the representation, opening up a space in her own enclosed image of self.

It is during her first narration of (and address to) the painting that Lucrece, in effect, crosses over into what she sees, and also into herself as representation (Other). Indeed, the rhetorical features of her speech in this passage emphasize an emerging detachment from female space.

In the narrator's second passage, half the length of the first, Lucrece's impassioned response from within the painting is narrated. The text implements Simonides's aphorism mentioned earlier when Lucrece prosopopoeically gives language to the silent, painted figures, who in turn give to her her own movements and expressions. The narrator's language rearranges Lucrece's reality within her reading of the painting and herself. However, in her second passage, in which Lucrece responds emphatically to the artist's perjury of Sinon's face (linking Sinon to Tarquin), she takes control of her own seeing by the linguistic rearranging of what she sees.

In the narrator's third passage Lucrece is represented as having pulled back from her former rage, directed not only at Sinon/Tarquin, but also at the circumstances of her own (now oblique) "story."

The possibility of conferring worldhood on her own story, a place to which she returns from the embedded narrative of the painting, undergoes an anachronic shift. The space Lucrece's newly sighted eyes now project has little in common with her former world. At the moment of her death her language, actions, and seeing have a curious unity that allows us in, while holding back the males present in the scene.