Amnon Attacking Tamar  1520

King David's son Amnon pretended to be sick, and, when his half-sister Tamar came to visit him, he treacherously raped her (2 Samuel). In the later 1500s once the athletic ideal of classical antiquity and contemporary Italian art had been absorbed in the Netherlands, painters would typically depict such threatening male figures with far more muscular builds. Setting the sc...