Formerly held in a private collection and exhibited under the title "La Pulce" (The Flea) at Flint Galleries before being correctly recognized as Cleopatra and sold through Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, to the Flint Institute of Arts.
Elisabetta Sirani’s Cleopatra (1663), housed in the Flint Institute of Arts, offers a striking reconsideration of the ways in which the Egyptian queen had been represented in seventeenth-century history painting. Rather than reproducing the passive and eroticised conventions associated with Cleopatra’s death, Sirani turns to an episode that foregrounds the monarch’s intelligence, theatrical self-control, and political agency. Painted during a period of considerable artistic maturity in Bologna, the work deliberately moves away from the familiar image of Cleopatra’s suicide, a subject treated repeatedly by artists such as Guido Reni, Guercino, and Guido Cagnacci. In these representations, Cleopatra was often reduced to a reclining and highly sensual figure whose death became inseparable from the visual pleasures of the exposed female body and the phallic symbolism of the asp.
As Ilaria Splendorini observes, Reni frequently adapted the upward-gazing, spiritually charged eyes of Raphael’s Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia for his dying pagan heroines. This transposition transformed scenes of political defeat and death into spectacles of passive receptivity, making the female subject available to the viewer’s gaze even in the moment of her destruction. Sirani takes a different approach. Drawing upon classical literary sources available in her father’s extensive library, including Pliny the Elder’s Natural History and Plutarch’s Lives, she depicts Cleopatra during the celebrated banquet wager with Mark Antony. The choice of subject is significant because it shifts attention away from the queen’s death and towards her capacity for calculation, performance, and sovereign decision-making.
Sirani places Cleopatra against a dark and largely unadorned background, removing the crowds, elaborate interiors, and decorative details that might otherwise dilute the force of the central action. The queen appears in a half-length, three-quarter view, dressed in an elegant gown embellished with jewels, a fringed white turban, and a richly coloured mantle. Her costume establishes her status, but the composition does not depend upon spectacle alone. Instead, the viewer’s attention is directed towards her face, hands, and the object she is about to place in the silver vessel.
According to Pliny, Cleopatra wagered with Mark Antony that she could spend ten million sesterces on a single banquet. She demonstrated the extent of her wealth by removing a priceless pearl earring, dropping it into a cup of vinegar, and swallowing it after it dissolved. Sirani chooses not to depict the completed act. She captures the moment immediately before the pearl enters the vessel, suspending the narrative between intention and execution. This pause is crucial to the painting’s meaning. Cleopatra’s power lies not simply in the extravagance of the gesture, but in her control over its timing and its effect upon the observer. The wager becomes a display of wealth, ingenuity, and political confidence, while the queen herself remains the active organiser of the scene.
The painting’s restrained composition is reinforced by its lighting. A cool light enters from the left, illuminating Cleopatra’s face, neck, and hands, while the opposite side of the canvas recedes into deep shadow. This chiaroscuro does more than establish volume or dramatic contrast. It concentrates attention upon the queen’s expression and the deliberate movement of her hands, making her mental composure as important as the material value of the pearl. The darkness surrounding her also removes much of the narrative context, allowing her intelligence and self-possession to become the principal subjects of the image.
Splendorini identifies a further dimension in Sirani’s treatment of Cleopatra through her engagement with Simone Cantarini’s Artemisia, in which the widowed queen is shown holding her husband’s ashes. Sirani adapts the dignified and restrained posture associated with heroic widowhood, but redirects its meaning towards Cleopatra’s intellectual and political agency. The comparison is especially revealing when considered alongside the more passive emotional formulas associated with Reni. Even in Sirani’s later version of the subject, dated 1664 and now held in a private collection in Modena, the exposed breasts of the figure do not displace the central emphasis on the wager. The queen’s body remains visible, but her cunning and composure continue to organise the image.
This reinterpretation is also connected to Sirani’s position within the artistic culture of seventeenth-century Bologna. As the head of her own workshop, she occupied a professional role that was rarely available to women, particularly within the demanding field of history painting. Her achievements challenged the restrictions that often directed female artists towards portraiture, still life, or other supposedly more suitable genres. Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s praise of her “virile” brush and monumental *maniera* reveals both his recognition of her ability and the gendered language through which female artistic achievement was often understood. His emphasis on her *ingegno* acknowledges an intellectual and creative capacity that contemporary assumptions frequently treated as masculine.
Sirani’s Cleopatra does not gaze upwards in helpless appeal. Instead, she looks across the picture plane with a restrained and confident expression, accompanied by a faint smile. Her authority is conveyed through composure rather than overt physical force. By choosing a moment in which Cleopatra exercises intelligence, wealth, and control, Sirani shifts the representation of the queen away from the familiar spectacle of eroticised suffering. The painting does not simply replace one image of Cleopatra with another. It reworks the terms through which female historical agency can be visualised, presenting the queen as a figure whose intellect and self-possession are inseparable from her political power.
an expert in art writing with experience 20 + years
Sirani's Cleopatra has always struck me as an argument disguised as a portrait. Painted in a century that could barely imagine the queen without a snake and a bared chest, Sirani gives her a pearl instead — the wager with Antony rather than the suicide. That single substitution does most of the intellectual work of the painting. She isn't dying here; she's calculating, and the whole composition organizes itself around that fact. The dark, unadorned background strips away every distraction a male contemporary might have reached for — no attendants, no palace, no spectacle — leaving nothing between the viewer and the queen's face, hands, and the small object suspended between them.
What I find genuinely moving is the restraint. Cleopatra isn't gazing upward in ecstatic surrender the way Reni's dying heroines so often do; she looks across the picture plane, composed, almost amused. Sirani captures her a beat before the pearl dissolves — intention, not completion — which turns the whole image into a study of self-possession rather than loss. As a woman running her own workshop in a field that rarely let women near history painting, Sirani had every reason to paint intelligence as a woman's defining trait rather than her undoing, and I think that's exactly what she's doing here: reclaiming a queen from spectacle and handing her back her mind.
