Das Bankett der Kleopatra

This is the small first version of a scene Tiepolo would work up several times: Cleopatra's wager. The story comes from Pliny, writing in Rome in the first century. Cleopatra had bet Mark Antony she could spend a fortune on a single supper, and to win it she took one of her huge pearl earrings, dropped it into a glass of sharp wine to dissolve, and drank it. Tiepolo catches the instant before, as she holds the pearl aloft between two fingers and the guests look on. He painted this modello around 1742 in Venice as a trial run, and it stayed with his friend Count Algarotti, a collector, before the finished canvas travelled abroad. The palace and silk gowns around Cleopatra belong to Tiepolo's own century, dressing an Egyptian queen as an 18th-century Venetian.