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 exhibition is accompanied by an extensive and attractive catalogue, with a series of scholarly essays on various aspects of Cleopatra's origins, career and fortunes (both contemporary and posthumous) as well as documentary entries on the individual works and numerous handsome, mostly color, illustrations. Many issues and themes contributory to a proper appreciation of the works are explicitly addressed only in the catalogue texts and do not necessarily emerge through perusal of the installation alone. Nor do two topics of obvious contemporary interest, which the exhibition's contents themselves virtually force upon our notice--the mutual interpenetration of artistic cultures in a multicultural society and the exceptional role of the royal women in the Ptolemaic state--receive central treatment in the catalogue either.

In the show's London incarnation, at least, the possibilities of effective communication through significant juxtapositions and proper distribution of emphasis among major works and those of only ancillary interest were underutilized. The catalogue, likewise, is not without its risks for the unwary. Certain essays--in particular Guy Weill Goudchaux's article on Cleopatra's religious policy--do not adequately distinguish between relatively well-established facts versus speculations and interpretations advanced by the author. The nonspecialist reader would hardly realize, for example, that the supposed connection between Cleopatra and the great Nilotic mosaic at Palestrina is a conjecture with which most scholars would disagree. Or that the bronze statuette put forward as a portrait of Antony and Cleopatra's son, Alexander Helios, in oriental dress is most likely an image of the child-god Attis.

Such complaints, however, should not discourage the prospective visitor. The exhibition brings together many extraordinary and eloquent works from widely disparate sources, which open up an engrossing chapter of world history and civilization. The essays and entries in the catalogue represent a significant effort of synthesis, yielding delight for the interested lay reader as well as a rich resource for scholars. The majority of the works exhibited have never been shown here before on this continent and almost certainly will not be again in the foreseeable future. This is a vertiginous glimpse into the Classical world in relation to its Other, and into one of that world's outstanding personalities. As demonstrated by the section appended to the exhibition in its Chicago venue--in which politically charged questions of ethnicity are explored--we have by no means heard the last of Cleopatra.

(1.) The development of the Cleopatra myth across the centuries has been analyzed in two recent books: Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions, London, Bloomsbury, 1990, and Mary Hamer, Signs of Cleopatra: History, Politics, Representation, London and New York, Routledge, 1993. Hamer has also contributed a chapter to the catalogue of the current exhibition.