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

Most remarkable of all is the portrait of a queen, now in the Louvre, whose identity is disputed between Cleopatra II (145/4-116 B.C.) and her daughter--and bitter enemy and rival--Cleopatra III (141-101 B.C.). Enmeshed in a prolonged and appallingly bloody struggle against each other and the hapless menfolk of their family, these two marked a singular innovation in the history of the dynasty and of Hellenistic kingship at large: they were the first royal women to exercise power not simply de facto but avowedly de jure as heads of state like the kings; they were thus important precedents for Cleopatra VII herself, who similarly ruled in her own right, even if alongside nominal male colleagues. (14) Although the queen's hair is dressed in corkscrew locks signifying her identification with Isis, she is anything but a nurturing mother-goddess. She is shown in violent action, her head twisted forcefully to the left, the deep-set eyes peering fiercely from beneath contracted brows, the mouth sharply turned down at the corners, the chin defiantly thrust forward. This image is unique among known female portraits from the Classical world, utterly in contradiction to the decorum and modesty normative for the genre; its domineering attitude and expression are otherwise exclusively the prerogatives of male ruler images.

Cleopatra's own portraits are the obvious focus of greatest interest, promising some insight into the magnetic attraction which the queen's personality exerted upon her contemporaries and has continued to exercise across the centuries, along with a glimpse of her fabled beauty. We still, naively perhaps but irresistibly, trust that those carved stones can somehow vault us over the millennia to a kind of psychic and even perceptual proximity to their subject. Only the works of Hellenistic origin offer portraits of the queen in our modern sense, since the features of Cleopatra's images in traditional Egyptian style vary little from long-sanctioned conventional norms. Among a number of sculptural portraits of ladies contemporary with or vaguely resembling the queen, (15) as well as one (from Cherchel in Algeria, where her daughter reigned) that perhaps represents her at a later stage of life, are the two sculptural images that current scholarship views as unquestionable portraits of Cleopatra.

One of these--the first to be recognized as such, in the 1930s--has long been in the Vatican collection in Rome; the other first became known when it was acquired by the Berlin Museum in the 1980s. Both show an attractive young woman corresponding to the queen's early numismatic profiles, and at first appear quite similar. Closer inspection reveals significant differences, sufficient to exclude the possibility of a common prototype. Beyond dissimilarities in details of coiffure and diadem, these extend to the facial features and, indeed, the portrait conception as a whole. The Berlin head--initial questions regarding its authenticity having faded owing to the recent establishment of a secure provenance (16)--presents the young queen at a slightly later age, her face thinner, her expression composed and studiedly neutral; the even surfaces and closed contours reflect the neo-Classic artistic tendencies of the later first century B.C., most familiar to us in the subsequent Augustan Classicism of Rome. The Vatican head was until recently visible only at a disadvantage, set onto a statue to which it did not belong, which was in turn mounted high on a pedestal in an indifferently lit gallery, the face disfigured by modern restorations. We can now see it dismounted and set at eye level, cleaned and free of restorations.