Cleopatra
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Featured visual  One of the iconic images of French erotica. Notice the peeping tom lying at her feet trying to glare upskirt
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Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator (January 69 BC–November 30 30 BC) was a Hellenistic ruler of Egypt. She consummated a liaison with Gaius Julius Caesar, that solidified her grip on the throne, and, after Caesar's assassination, aligned with Mark Antony, with whom she produced twins.
After Antony and Cleopatra were defeated by their rival and Caesar's legal heir, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian (who later became the first Roman Emperor, Augustus), Cleopatra committed suicide, the traditional date being 12 August 30 BC, allegedly by means of an asp bite.
To this day she remains popular in Western culture.
Her appeal lays in her legend as a great seductress who was able to ally herself with two of the most powerful men (Julius Caesar and Marc Antony) of her time, thus becoming the archetype of the "strong woman".
In fiction
Her legacy survives in numerous works of art and the many dramatizations of her story in literature, (e.g. Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Bernard Shaw's Caesar & Cleopatra) film, and television. (e.g. Elizabeth Taylor's famous depiction in Cleopatra, and the BBC/HBO co-production Rome)
In most depictions, Cleopatra is put forward as a great beauty and her successive conquests of the world's most powerful men is taken to be proof of her aesthetic and sexual appeal. Whether or not she would have been considered beautiful by current standards is unknown, but clearly she was appealing by the standards of her time. In his Pensées, philosopher Blaise Pascal contends that Cleopatra's classically beautiful profile changed world history: "Cleopatra's nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed."
Her suicide in visual art
Beginning with the Renaissance and continuing into later centuries individual artists, as well as artistic movements (e.g. Romanticism, Decandatism), have demonstrated a veritable passion for and derived much inspiration from Cleopatra's suicide; among the most well known pictorial iterations of Cleopatra's suicide are Cagnacci's Death of Cleopatra (1658) and Rixens's work of the same name (1874). A work that may have inspired Rixen's painting is Gautier's story Une Nuit de Cléopâtre (1838), which includes a fantastic—and an undisguisedly fetishistic—description of the Egyptian queen's body post-mortem. Other renditions include paintings by Reginald Arthur, Augustin Hirschvogel, the aforementioned Guido Cagnacci, Johann Liss, John William Waterhouse and Jean-André Rixens.
