The Death of Cleopatra

When Liss painted this, around the middle of the 1620s, he was living in Rome among the artists from the north who worked there. They had just formed a fellowship of their own, the Schildersbent, and gave every member a nickname. His was Pan. The picture shows how the Egyptian queen ended her life after the death of Mark Antony, to avoid being taken prisoner by Octavian, with the bite of a snake hidden in a basket of fruit. The museum adds that in ancient Egyptian belief that bite was meant to grant immortality. Scholars read the painting's handling in two ways. The museum sees the Rome of Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci in it. The Neue Deutsche Biographie, the standard German biographical dictionary, singles out this canvas and finds a Flemish hand in it, learned in Antwerp. The painting has been in Munich since 1964, when it was bought from a Swiss private collection.