The Suicide of Cleopatra

In August of the year 30 BC, with Octavian's army in Alexandria, Cleopatra killed herself rather than be led through the streets of Rome in his triumph. Plutarch tells how the asp was smuggled in to her in a basket of figs. More than 1,600 years later this canvas came to Rome itself, into the hands of the Barberini, the family of Pope Urban VIII. It was a present from Marco Marazzoli, a musician in the service of Cardinal Antonio Barberini, and Lanfranco painted it around 1630. The museum reads it as a scene from a Baroque musical drama, the kind of sung theatre the Barberini were staging in Rome in those years. The queen's eyes are wide open and her lips parted, and her body, lit almost like antique marble, comes out of the dark wrapped in a cloth of fiery red. Lanfranco used the same model as for his Venus Playing the Harp, another of Marazzoli's gifts. The picture left the family when the Barberini collection was dispersed in the 1930s, and in 2022 the Italian state bought it for the museum in the Barberini's own palace.