クレオパトラの饗宴

The story here comes from Pliny, the Roman writer, and it is really about showing off. Cleopatra had bet Mark Antony that she could spend a fortune on a single dinner, ten million sesterces, more than it cost to keep a small army. To win it she is doing the thing this picture catches: dropping one of her enormous pearl earrings into a cup of vinegar to dissolve it and drink it down. Jordaens paints the guests frozen between admiration and unease, and he plants a jester at the side who points at the queen with a smirk, as if to say the whole thing is madness. By 1653 Jordaens was the leading painter left in Antwerp, with Rubens long dead, and he fills this ancient banquet, as he usually did, with the broad, ruddy faces of his own Flemish neighbours dressed up as kings and queens.