In the early history of Rome a peace treaty was drawn up between the Romans and the Etruscans, under the terms of which the Romans handed over as hostages to the Etruscan King Lars Porsena ten daughters and ten sons of patrician Roman families, of whom Cloelia was one. She mounted a daring escape from the enemy camp, crossing the River Tiber on horseback and persuading her companions to swim after her. But for fear of rekindling hostilities, the girls were sent back, whereupon Porsena, in admiration of her courage, granted Cloelia and her companions freedom. In his drawing, Salviati shows the girls stealing out of the Etruscan encampment while the guards sleep. Occupying the lower left corner of the drawing are an old river god with an overturned urn issuing water, signifying the Tiber, and the she wolf suckling the infants Romulus and Remus, symbol of Rome.

The drawing has been associated with a lost fresco of this subject by Salviati on the façade of the Casa Loredan in Campo Santo Stefano, Venice, which has been dated to the mid-1550s. Ridolfi described the scene as 'Cloelia with her companions, when they are crossing the Tiber, while King Porsena's sentinels sleep.' It was one of a series of scenes from the early history of Rome on the façade, which was described in effusive terms in the early sources. Even in Ridolfi's day some of the scenes were in a ruinous condition, and no trace of them remains. A second drawing of this subject by Salviati, formerly in the grand-ducal collections in Weimar, has also been linked with the Casa Loredan fresco. It is conceived rather differently to the Edinburgh drawing, with the sleeping soldiers and two girls in the foreground, but with a mounted Cloelia already crossing the Tiber in the middle distance. This latter detail would seem to conform better to Ridolfi's description.

The Edinburgh drawing is smaller in scale and rather different in handling to the Weimar drawing and to other sheets by the artist assigned to the 1550s, and the possibility that it was made in connection with some earlier project, perhaps in the mid-1540s, cannot be excluded.4 The maiden seen from behind at the rear of the group, looking over her shoulder in lost profile, is a recurrent type in Salviati's work. An alternative attribution of the drawing to Lambert Sustris (c.i515 — after 1591), a Netherlandish artist active in Venice and the Veneto, has been proposed, but the figure style seems altogether more elegant and the handling more refined than in other drawings attributed to Sustris.

This text was first published in The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art from Scottish Collections (2004)