Death of Cleopatra

Held in the Louvre's Department of Paintings and dated around 1640, Turchi's Death of Cleopatra is a late-career treatment of one of Baroque painting's most charged secular subjects. The Egyptian queen's suicide by asp-bite provided painters with a pretext for depicting a beautiful, semi-undressed woman in extremis — a subject that hovered between historical narrative, erotic spectacle, and moral meditation on defeated ambition. Turchi's version, produced when he was in his sixties, demonstrates the enduring market for such mythological-historical subjects among aristocratic collectors. The Louvre's acquisition of this work reflects the seventeenth-century French appetite for Italian Baroque painting, a taste shaped by Cardinal Mazarin and the great noble collectors of the reign of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. Turchi brings to the subject the same psychological concentration he applied to religious scenes: Cleopatra's beauty and vulnerability are rendered with the same luminous tenderness as his Madonnas.

The half-length or three-quarter figure format typical of Turchi's Cleopatra compositions concentrates attention on the face and décolleté. Oil on canvas allows the delicate modelling of female flesh that made these works desirable. The asp on the breast or arm provides a vertical compositional accent against the reclining figure.