Cleopatra probando venenos en los condenados

The story comes from Plutarch, who wrote that Cleopatra, deciding how she would take her own life, first tested poisons on prisoners already condemned to die, watching coolly to learn which death was gentlest. Cabanel painted that in 1887, and the reclining queen studying a dying man across the room is doing exactly that, calculating. By then Cabanel was one of the most decorated painters in France, the establishment's favourite, and this lush Egyptian scene was praised as a triumph of the taste for the exotic East. That taste has a name now, Orientalism, and the picture is treated as a textbook example of it. Its staging fed straight into the stage plays and early films about Cleopatra that came soon after, where she is imagined much as Cabanel imagined her, gorgeous and watching someone else die.