Cleopatra, oil on canvas, dimensions 97 x 77 (canvas only) Author: circle of Francesco del Cairo (Milan 1607-1665)

The painting we propose depicts Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, a young woman of precocious emancipation, a true synthesis of power, culture and beauty, one of the most controversial and at the same time most loved and revisited subjects in the history of Western painting.

The many artistic experiments centered on the bewitching Ptolemaic sovereign have produced works that have significantly contributed to accentuating the aura of fascination and mystery surrounding the character, in which the period between the end of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thanks to the work of biographers Giulio Landi for the sixteenth century and Paganino Gaudenzi for the seventeenth century, sees two different readings of Cleopatra clash: the sixteenth-century Renaissance optimism in the human faculty of self-determination and the conflicted admiration of the Baroque (pregnant with Counter-Reformation moralism) for a subject to be blamed, but for this very reason no less fascinating in her intrinsic provocative character.

Our canvas , which reveals a technique that is at times an accomplice of an almost Flemish materiality, in its execution as in its details (among all the basket of fruit in the foreground) constitutes an eloquent, synthetic and successful experiment of complete synthesis between the classicist painting of the artists of the Emilian school (Reni and Guercino), the late Flemish epigones of Caravaggio and the experience of the early Baroque (Giovanni Lanfranco, Pietro da Cortona), all elements of a complex map of references that bring us back, in their harmonious coexistence, to the experience of the Milanese painter Francesco Del Cairo, also known as Cavalier Cairo (Milan 1607-1665), who, precisely in the years 1637-1638, on the occasion of his trip to Rome, experiences all the aforementioned "lessons".

The figure of Cleopatra, like that of other “femmes fatales”, does not represent an isolated case in the context of Francesco D el Cairo's representations: one recalls the “Dying Cleopatra” in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan or the Salome and Herodias created in Turin for the court of Savoy, following the transfer to the Savoy capital in 1633.

If the sixteenth century had offered the best examples of “Cleopatra” with Giampietrino (Paris, Louvre, 1515) and with Rosso Fiorentino ( Braunschweig, HA Ulrich-Museum, 1525), in the seventeenth century, and therefore also for Cavalier Cairo, the undisputed model was the version by Reni (Florence, Palazzo Pitti, 1640) which was re-proposed several times according to the taste of the time: robust and abundant physique, round oval face, pale complexion, blond hair, graceful nose and lips. To this stereotype will be added a further standardization of the historical character: Cleopatra is dying, often accompanied by the serpent of Isis, a divinity with which she had wanted to identify herself so much as to earn her the title of “new Isis”.

Now in our painting, just like in the aforementioned Reni model in Palazzo Pitti, the basket of fruit appears in the foreground, even though in our canvas we can perceive a greater complicity oriented towards erotic sensuality, ideally transcended in Reni, while the representation of the uncovered breast and the unbuttoned clothes remain as fixed points.

However, it is with the Caravaggio-esque Artemisia Gentileschi that the point of greatest personalization of the Egyptian queen is reached (Cleopatra, Ferrara, Cavallini-Sgarbi Foundation, around 1620) : no longer shapely, but corpulent, no longer in an elegant pose like a Greek statue, but disheveled, without draperies, baskets and maids, dramatically isolated in a scene that alone fills the crude realism of the facial expression.

In comparison to all this, our painting seems to still maintain some character of classicist elegance, in which the Caravaggio lesson prefers to infiltrate in the aforementioned detail of the fruit basket, although its position in the foreground, beyond the emphasis given here to the accentuation of the shadow, is a tribute to the Renian model.

The map of important references and terms of comparison with our painting would however be incomplete without mentioning the well-known subject by Guido Cagnacci “Death of Cleopatra ” (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1659), in which the diamond crown constitutes an element of specular comparison with our canvas, restoring to the sovereign all her regality.

For the sake of completeness, let us recall how references to Reni's version can also be found in Guercino (Pasadena, Norton Simon Museum, 1621; Genoa, Musei di Strada Nuova, 1648) , whose lesson Cairo also absorbed during his aforementioned stay in Rome : basket in the foreground, theatrical pose, idealised physique, neither realistic nor sensual, gaze turned upwards.

The queen is now depicted as if she were a saint: the contrast between Eros and Religion, pregnant with all the implications of the Counter-Reformation, without the possibility of resolution on the level of real life, is masterfully resolved off-screen in the pictorial sphere.

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