The Death of Cleopatra

The Death of Cleopatra

The Death of Cleopatra

Artist:Guido Cagnacci (Italian, Santarcangelo di Romagna 1601–1663 Vienna)
Date:ca. 1645–55
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:37 3/8 × 29 1/2 in. (95 × 75 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Purchase, Diane Burke Gift, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, by exchange, Friends of European Paintings Gifts, Gwynne Andrews Fund, Lila Acheson Wallace, Charles and Jessie Price, and Álvaro Saieh Bendeck Gifts, Gift and Bequest of George Blumenthal and Fletcher Fund, by exchange, and Michel David-Weill Gift, 2016

The subject, from Plutarch's Lives (1st century A.D.), is Cleopatra's suicide by an asp bite following the defeat of her beloved Mark Antony at the battle of Actium. It provided Cagnacci with an erotically charged and emotionally engaging action that appealed to the Baroque imagination, whether in poetry, theater, or painting. Although Cagnacci’s picture is indebted to the example of Guido Reni, its flagrant sensuality is utterly singular. Cagnacci made a trip to Rome in the company of Guercino, where Caravaggio’s example of painting directly from the model proved transformative. The model here may be the artist’s mistress.

Catalogue Entry
The Artist: Cagnacci was from the town of Santarcangelo—in the Romagna region of Italy, not far from Rimini. Following his local training, he spent time in the prestigious Carracci academy in Bologna, drawing from posed models, and then went to Rome in the company of one of the great masters of Baroque painting, Guercino (he was living with Guercino in 1622). There the example of Caravaggio and the practice of painting directly from the model proved transformative. Returning to Saludecio, Rimini, Forlì, and other cities in the Romagna, he painted works of such originality that even today they can cause astonishment among those familiar with Baroque painting. His is the classic case of the provincial who, after making contact with the key figures of his day, returns home and evolves his own highly personal but at the same time highly sophisticated style. A nonconformist in life as in his art, in October 1628, Cagnacci had to flee Rimini when he attempted to elope with the widow of a prominent family. He continued to have affairs and is reported to have been accompanied in his peregrinations by a woman dressed as a man. When he moved to Venice, where he is first documented in 1649, he was, again, living with his lover/model. There he specialized in single-figure, half-length compositions for the market, often featuring a female in dishabille acting the role of Cleopatra or Lucretia. He moved from Venice to Vienna (by 1660), evidently at the invitation of Archduke Leopold I, and it was there that he painted what remains one of the most individual paintings of the entire seventeenth century: The Conversion of the Magdalen, now in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. He died in Vienna.

The Picture: The subject derives from Plutarch's Lives and shows Cleopatra's suicide by an asp bite following the defeat of her beloved Mark Antony at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C. and his subsequent death. The subject was popular in the seventeenth century and was notably treated by Guido Reni (Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence), whose work Cagnacci clearly knew. It is a subject that provided the kind of erotically charged as well as emotionally engaging action that appealed to the Baroque imagination, whether in poetry, theater, or painting. Shakespeare expresses the conflicted emotions found in Cagnacci’s depiction in his play Antony and Cleopatra:　"The Stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, / Which hurts, and is desired."　And a poem written by Antonio Bruni (1593–1635) on a depiction of Cleopatra by Guido Reni is equally pertinent (Le tre gratie, rime, Rome, 1630, p. 173):
Ingenious brush,
That giving life to Egypt’s Queen has made
Her so alive that some before her bow:
Fair monarch, not by asp but love betrayed.
Love kills her.
The way to give her life the painter knows:
The brush breathes vital spirits in her,
The serpent then upon her death bestows.
Like Reni’s painting, Cagnacci’s picture is an independent work suitable for the gallery of a private collector and, in fact, we know of paintings such as this one in private collections in Venice. It has been dated to about 1645–50; if it is as late as 1650, there is the possibility that it was painted for Michiel Valenzin—a Jewish resident in Venice who owned two works by Cagnacci, a Jacob and a Cleopatra (see Stefania Mason, "Un itinerario per dipinti, disegni, stampe e qualche curiosità nelle collezioni della Venezia barocca," in Linda Borean and Stefania Mason, Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia: il Seicento, Venice, 2007, p. 9). It may have been in Venice that the picture was sold to the 2nd or 3rd Earl of Caledon, in whose magnificent lodgings at 5 Carlton House Terrace, London, it is recorded in 1857, hanging in the drawing room between a painting by Guido Reni and a Madonna by Murillo.
What makes this artist's work—and The Met’s picture—so notable and so essential to any history of seventeenth-century painting is the sensual realism by which Cagnacci subverts the classic compositional procedures he mastered in Bologna and Rome, primarily on the example of Guido Reni. In his work the erotic element that is always present as a sublimated feature in the Renaissance tradition of the idealized female nude in the guise of Venus, Diana, Cleopatra, etc. becomes a primary, subversive, and disorienting feature, lending his paintings a startling modernity.
Cagnacci often did two variant treatments of his most successful compositions (though Salomon [2016] has posed the question of whether a workshop may have been involved in this activity). The Met’s Cleopatra is related to a picture in the Collezioni Comunali d'Arte, Bologna, in which the same figure is posed against a patterned curtain, pulled back for theatrical effect. As noted in the catalogue of the exhibition on the artist held in 2008 in Forlì, in The Met’s painting, Cagnacci is less idealized and more sensual, and there is a greater emphasis on psychological engagement with the figure. The presentation is more intimate, less "staged."
Keith Christiansen 2016

Provenance
James Du Pre Alexander, 3rd Earl of Caledon, London (until d. 1855); his son, James Alexander, 4th Earl of Caledon, London (1855–d. 1898); his son, Eric James Desmond Alexander, 5th Earl of Caledon, London (1898–1939; sale, Christie's, London, June 9, 1939, no. 32, as by Guido Reni, for £15.15 to Sabin); [Frank T. Sabin, London, from 1939]; private collection, Sweden (sold to Colnaghi); [Colnaghi, New York, until 1988; sold through Edmondo di Robilant]; private collection, Italy (1988–2014); [Fabrizio Moretti, London, 2014–16; sold to MMA]

Copyright Image
https://images.metmuseum.org