Signs of Cleopatra: Reading an Icon Historically
Mary Hamer
Abstract
Cleopatra has been dead for twenty centuries, but her name still resonates in the west. Her story has the status of a foundation myth. As such, artists of all periods have drawn on it in order to raise questions concerned with the world in which they found themselves living. This study chooses a number of key occasions from European history on which writers and painters re-imagined Cleopatra. In doing so it takes the reader on an intellectual treasure hunt through the ages. In addition, by restoring these works to their original context – political, philosophical and aesthetic – the author ope ... More
Cleopatra has been dead for twenty centuries, but her name still resonates in the west. Her story has the status of a foundation myth. As such, artists of all periods have drawn on it in order to raise questions concerned with the world in which they found themselves living. This study chooses a number of key occasions from European history on which writers and painters re-imagined Cleopatra. In doing so it takes the reader on an intellectual treasure hunt through the ages. In addition, by restoring these works to their original context – political, philosophical and aesthetic – the author opens up unexpected new readings of images and texts that had previously appeared to be self-explanatory. The purpose of this book is to raise questions about how these images of a dead Egyptian queen were read. Through careful analysis it traces attempts to manipulate attitudes to women and power, women and sexuality, and to desire itself. In the case of Tiepolo's Cleopatra, for example, the Queen embodies the desire for knowledge; in post-Revolutionary France, she symbolises political freedom. In the new introductory essay we discover that Cleopatra's role as a focus for cultural debate continues, and that, as previously, much is at stake: it is now the question of her race that is highly contested.
Keywords:
Cleopatra,
foundation myth,
European history,
Egyptian queen,
women and power,
women and sexuality,
desire for knowledge,
Tiepolo,
post-Revolutionary France,
political freedom
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2008 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780859898263 |
| Published to Liverpool Scholarship Online: May 2014 |
DOI:10.5949/liverpool/9780859898263.001.0001 |
