Who was Cleopatra? Supplementing ancient art works with later representations, an exhibition now at the Field Museum in Chicago explores the interpenetration of Greek and Egyptian styles—and the conflicting propaganda efforts by Cleopatra and her enemies in Rome that created the dualistic persona of history's most alluring queen

Art in America, Feb, 2002 by Sheldon Nodelman

The current installation at the Field Museum in Chicago--after previous appearances at venues in Rome and London--of a large-scale exhibition of ancient art centered upon the personality and historical role of the last Macedonian queen of Egypt testifies to the perdurable hold of Cleopatra upon the public imagination more than 20 centuries after her death. (1) This follows by little more than a decade a previous major international show on much the same theme--"Cleopatra's Egypt" of 1988, which originated at New York's Brooklyn Museum of Art (2)--and is virtually on the heels of another, "La gloire d'Alexandrie" of 1998, devoted to the culture of Cleopatra's glittering capital city, at the Petit Palais in Paris. (3) The last few years have seen an efflorescence of interest in Hellenistic Egypt, in Alexandrian art and civilization, and in the Ptolemaic dynasty which ruled the one and patronized the other--especially in its final and most fascinating representative, Cleopatra VII. The manifestations of this interest have ranged from scholarly publications and conferences (such as one held in 1996 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu (4)) to works in various languages aimed at a broader public to a rash of cable-TV specials on Cleopatra and her Alexandria over the past year or two. Midcourse stimulus has been provided by notable archeological discoveries at the site of Alexandria itself in recent years (of which more below), (5) but scholarly concern and popular interest in archeology do not fully explain this fascination.

Cleopatra is more than a historical personage, of whatever importance; she is a mythological figure--one whose hold on the imagination of posterity and whose adaptability to contemporary preoccupations have not in the least diminished. The present exhibition announces in its title, "Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth," the intention of addressing both of these identities. Cleopatra was already a myth in her own time--or, rather, a contest of opposed yet interlocking myths, white and black, her own and that of her adversaries, both of which have continued to reverberate ever since. In attempting--not altogether satisfactorily, perhaps--to explore this theme, the show also raises broader questions: how do these material artifacts, "works of art" or otherwise, relate to textually transmitted information and ideas (i.e., catalogues, signage, labels) as necessarily interactive elements of a comprehensive information system? And how do the order and conditions of display of the visual components themselves inflect the meanings they convey, articulating certain issues and perhaps suppressing others?

Such questions are the more acute in a historically conceived exhibition such as this, in which the significance of the objects displayed resides not only (in certain cases very little) in their immediately apprehensible qualities--however spectacular these may sometimes be--but also in frames of reference that may involve specialized knowledge outside the viewer's ordinary purview and that may vary, moreover, according to the different origins and intentions of the objects themselves. These and a number of other important and troublesome issues are raised by--if not entirely in--this rich exhibition, which assembles over 350 ancient works of art and other objects as well as several score more of post-antique date, from the early Renaissance to the present. The components gathered by organizers at the British Museum, in collaboration with the Fondazione Memmo in Rome, range from major sculptures to modest artifacts illustrative of the visual culture of Cleopatra's Greco-Egyptian realm.

The world that Cleopatra inherited had been created through the conquests of Alexander the Great. The successor kingdoms founded by his generals were colonial states with a Macedonian court and army, a transplanted population of Greek immigrants reproducing the institutions and culture of the homeland within newly founded cities, and a majority of indigenous people whose traditional culture and way of life were affected by the change in regime and the presence of the newcomers in degrees ranging from significantly to scarcely at all. Cleopatra's ancestor, the first Ptolemy (306-283/2 B.C.), wrested possession of Egypt, the richest country of the ancient Mediterranean world, founding a dynasty whose rulers successively bore his name and which would be the longest lived of the major Hellenistic monarchies--down to Cleopatra's death in 30 B.C. and Egypt's absorption into the Roman Empire. Ptolemy and his successors employed the resources of Egypt to create a wide-flung dominion which was for a time the most powerful of the Hellenistic states, but which by the time of Cleopatra's birth had been reduced--through internal dissension and the growing strength of Rome--to a poor shadow of its former greatness.

Cleopatra, in a grand gamble, sought not merely to maintain Egypt's precarious independence but to restore the Ptolemaic realm as it had been in its heyday. She contrived to compensate for the deficiencies of conventional politico-military power with her own audacious brand of personal politics, employing her fabulous allurements of mind and body to inveigle into alliance first one, then another of Rome's preeminent leaders. In this effort, in which image had to count more than brute reality, Cleopatra exploited to a previously unheard-of degree the techniques of public and court spectacle and of lavish display which Hellenistic monarchs--foremost among them the Ptolemies themselves--had developed to impress contemporaries, domestic and foreign, with their aura of godlike power and magnificence. (6) More than any predecessor, she focused these exhibitions of prodigious wealth and exotic luxury upon her own dazzling person--especially for the favored few who were allowed to witness her virtuosic performance at a more intimate distance. Breathless accounts of these productions--both the public extravaganzas and the closer-range but even more galvanizing self-enactments--in our classical sources attest to their extraordinary contemporary impact, and they would resonate across the centuries to inspire more recent Hollywood realizations. In the end, her dazzling high-wire act would fail, leaving behind an enduring legend--compounded of Cleopatra's own self-glamorization (sustained even through her dramatic suicide) and of Octavian's countermyth of the dangerously fascinating "oriental" temptress, cruel, corrupt and depraved, whose threat to Rome he had bravely averted. Intertwined, these strands of fable have wound themselves inextricably into the Western psyche--a process which has produced countless visual representations dating from the Renaissance forward and whose theatrical treatments stretch from the Antony and Cleopatra of Shakespeare through Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra to the cinematic succession in which Theda Bara, Claudette Colbert, Vivian Leigh and, most voluptuously, Elizabeth Taylor (to name only the most eminent stars) saturate the screen with their charms.