Death of Cleopatra

Plutarch wrote that the asp's bite brought no pain and no cry, only a heaviness and a slow dulling of the senses, with sweat on the face as the queen slipped away. Cagnacci painted that account rather than a struggle. Cleopatra sits back in her chair, the snake coiled on the armrest looking up at her face, and the death is nearly silent.

He had painted the subject before and would paint it again. Other versions are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the demand for them was real, since a dying queen was one of the few subjects that licensed an undressed woman in an Italian picture of the 1660s.

He signed this one on the left arm of the chair, close by the snake. It came to the Brera in 1960, given by the Milanese collector Alberto Saibene.