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

Antony, Caesar's lieutenant who eventually succeeded him as Cleopatra's bedmate and political partner, fares less well. With varying degrees of conviction, the exhibition puts forward a number of portraits as images of the triumvir. But none have a good claim to represent him. No two agree among themselves (nor with any of the few other portraits so far proposed as representing him) and only the Kingston Lacy bust--of Egyptian provenance and material--has even a passing resemblance to the numismatic and glyptic profiles which are our only secure point of departure for identifying Antony's portrait. Yet the bust's smooth features and air of fastidious hauteur do not accord very well with the heavy musculature and lowering, man-of-action expression which these profiles unanimously display. The condemnation visited upon the memory of a public enemy--in this case Octavian's defeated rival--and the consequent destruction of his images appear to have been more than usually effective. (18)

Cleopatra's nemesis Octavian, the later Augustus, appears in the exhibition through a number of portraits of varying materials, formats and degrees of interest. It is regrettable that none of these represents his so-called Actium type--thought to have been created on the occasion of the decisive victory which gained him the mastery of the Mediterranean world at Antony and Cleopatra's expense---in which he strikes an impassioned, storm-tossed pose very much on the model of the Hellenistic ruler portrait. In compensation, there is the British Museum's spectacular Augustus portrait from Meroe in the Sudan, which must originally have been set up only a few years afterward. The over-life-size bronze head is beautifully preserved, even retaining the inset eyes (of glass and alabaster) which add so much to its emotional intensity. The original model for this head, the Prima Porta portrait type, was created following the constitutional settlement of 27 B.C., symbolized by the conferral of the title Augustus. Such works sought to replace the contentious image of a victorious faction leader with a painstakingly constructed synthesis of sober, traditional Roman values suitable for the reconciliation of a divided society. Ironically perhaps---but with brilliantly successful results--the Greek sculptor of the Meroe portrait has reinterpreted this prototype in terms suitable to his Eastern public's conception of a proper ruler image, rejecting the censorship which the Roman model had imposed and reincorporating in the portrait, with its impetuous turn of the head and piercing, wide-eyed gaze, the dramatic bravura of a semidivine dynast. (19)

The impressive group of works which forms the core of the exhibition is accompanied by others less prepossessing and of sometimes doubtful relevance. The assortment of terra-cottas, ceramics, etc., serving to illustrate the visual culture of Alexandria and of the hinterland could easily have been more spirited. The fragment of bas-relief showing a warship, from a tomb at Praeneste east of Rome, has a relationship to the battle of Actium which is conjectural at best, while the caricatural pornographic scenes in Nilotic settings--a common motif found, for example, at Pompeii--alleged to be later hostile images of Cleopatra most likely have nothing to do with her. The sampling of works illustrative of Egyptomania--the enthusiasm for themes and images of Egyptian derivation, especially in the decorative arts, which was as prevalent in Early Imperial Rome as it would later be in 18th- and 19th-century Europe and America--is thin, given the considerable interest of the subject. (20) And the assortment of post-antique works documenting the afterlife of the Cleopatra myth from its revival by Boccaccio to the present, seems a casual afterthought. The rich trove of variously exotic and sensationalist representations--especially 19th-century history paintings--created over several centuries to depict Cleopatra's daring adventures, her luxurious excesses, her erotic enchantments and her suicide--tragic, but in these depictions inevitably sexually tinged--has hardly been mined, to say nothing of the queen's dramatic and cinematic trajectory, and its reflections in the Cleo of 20th-century popular culture. This is a theme worthy of an exhibition of its own; perhaps it would have been best to reserve it for one--or, if not, to have brought the two components, "history" and posthumous mythology, into better balance and a more active dialogue with each other.