Cleopatra y César

Gerome showed this at the Paris Salon of 1866, and it fixed an image of Cleopatra that has stuck ever since. She has just been smuggled into Caesar's quarters rolled inside a length of cloth, and here she steps free of it while a kneeling servant gathers up the folds. Caesar looks up from his papers, caught off guard. The famous carpet in the story is mostly a later invention. Ancient sources say she was carried in wrapped in bedding, and only an 18th-century English translation turned it into a carpet, but Gerome, a careful reconstructor of the ancient world, ran with the more theatrical version. He surrounds her with what he took to be authentic Egyptian detail, the painted walls, the guardsman, the low lamplight. The whole drama turns on that half-unrolled bundle on the floor.