The Death of Cleopatra

Stanzione's Death of Cleopatra, painted around 1630, depicts the Egyptian queen's legendary suicide by asp rather than submit to Roman humiliation after Marc Antony's defeat. Cleopatra's death was among the most charged subjects in Baroque painting: combining the erotic, the exotic, the tragic, and the heroic into a single image. The exposed female body in the moment of death — painful yet beautiful — satisfied the Baroque fascination with the boundary between life and death, pleasure and pain. Stanzione's Naples provided a sophisticated market for such images, and the painting entered Russian imperial collections, eventually passing to the Hermitage, where it remains an important example of seventeenth-century Neapolitan painting in Eastern Europe.

Stanzione renders Cleopatra's dying figure with the polished elegance that earned him comparison with Guido Reni. The pale, luminous skin of the dying queen is treated with great care, its pallor suggesting both the onset of death and an idealized feminine beauty. The asp — small, almost incidental — is placed with compositional tact. Rich textile details anchor the exotic setting.