Cleopatra's Suicide

In 30 BC, with Alexandria taken, Octavian wanted Cleopatra alive. He meant to bring her to Rome and lead her through the streets in his triumph, and she killed herself rather than be paraded there. Cagnacci shows the queen already slipping away in a high red chair, a small crown still in her hair, her head fallen onto her shoulder. She is completely still. All the movement belongs to the six women crowded around her. Some weep, some lean in to look, and at the left two of them throw up their hands against the snake. The museum describes the picture as two ways of painting set side by side, servants caught with sharp, restless realism around a queen posed with classical calm. Cagnacci painted it in his last years, while he was working in Vienna, and it went into the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the emperor's uncle, whose pictures became the core of this gallery.