Despair, Lot and his daughters, The Dutch Renaissance, Lucas van Leyden

It is the name that identifies a biblical passage from Genesis 19, which gives rise to an iconographic theme widely represented in art from the Renaissance, thanks to its status as a lurid incest scene.

Lot’s daughters are on a break in their flight from Sodom, where they live.

Her relationship with his father is quite strange.

For reasons of hospitality, he offers them to lie down to his neighbors who despise them, preferring to rape the angels that God sends to warn him of the destruction of the city.

They have lost her mother, who has just been turned into a pillar of salt, for she cannot help but turn to see the city destroyed.

Seeing that their inevitable destinies are going to be loneliness, they decide to get their father drunk and have sex with him, to become pregnant.

Their names are not mentioned in the Bible, but they are mentioned in the Book of Jasher as Paltih and Tamires, although in Genesis they appear those of the children conceived by Moab and Ben Ammi, from whom Moabites and Ammonites descend.

The painters who represent the subject are; 1528 Lucas Cranach the Elder, in 1520 Lucas van Leyden, 1537 Altdorfer, 1565 Bonifacio de Pitati, Tintoretto, 1565 Jan Massys, 1616 Francesco Furini, Hendrick Golzius, 1618-1620 in the workshop of Rubens Jacob Jordaens, 1622 Orazio Gentileschi, 1635- 1638 Artemisa Gentileschi, 1633 Simon Vouet, 1844 Gustave Courbert etc.