Signs of Cleopatra
Signs of Cleopatra: Reading an Icon Historically
Mary Hamer
Copyright Date: 2008
Edition: NED - New edition, 2
Published by: Liverpool University Press
Pages: 192
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjm38
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Book Info
Signs of Cleopatra
Book Description:

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 Mary Hamer takes the reader on a pleasurable 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 which 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 Hamer 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.

eISBN: 978-1-78138-072-7
Subjects: History
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-v)
  3. List of plates
    List of plates (pp. vi-viii)
  4. Preface to the 2008 edition
    Preface to the 2008 edition (pp. ix-x)
  5. Acknowledgements
    Acknowledgements (pp. xi-xii)
  6. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. xiii-xx)

    It was the baffling opacity of pictures that propelled me into this study. Leafing through the files of the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute, with rather a different project (about Shakespeare’s women) in mind, I was brought up short by the images I found under the heading of Cleopatra. In the first place, they were so unfamiliar. They did not reflect or match my own sense of what Cleopatra was about. That sense, as I was to realize some time later, was overwhelmingly determined by Shakespeare’s presentation. The pictures I found did not address the narrative ofAntony and...

  7. Chapter 1 Looking like a queen
    Chapter 1 Looking like a queen (pp. 1-23)

    It wasn’t until 1933 that the Vatican realized they’d got their hands on Cleopatra. The only way of seeing her before had been through the ambiguous and unsatisfactory texts of poets and the slightly daunting profile on the coinage she issued. Now, a yellowish marble head, stuck to an alien body and its nose repaired in a programme of restoration, was declared a portrait of Cleopatra VII, last queen of Egypt (Plate 1.1). At last there was a chance of getting a proper look.

    Curiosity and the desire for possession are forms of response to the mystery of Cleopatra’s power....

  8. Chapter 2 Cleopatra: housewife
    Chapter 2 Cleopatra: housewife (pp. 24-44)

    In 1669 the Dutch painter Jan de Braij of Haarlem memorialized the parents and four siblings he had lost in the plague of 1663–4 in a family portrait. Set in an interior furnished with some opulence, the picture would seem to record and mourn a vanished era of domestic harmony and fulfilment. Only one detail jars: the parents are represented as Antony and Cleopatra (Plate 2. 2).

    Accounts of contemporary practice offer no immediate resource to the bewildered spectator. InGods, Saints and Heroes: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt, Albert Blankert and others address the relation between...

  9. Chapter 3 Newton and Cleopatra
    Chapter 3 Newton and Cleopatra (pp. 45-76)

    In the Palazzo Labia in Venice, in a room now used for conferences by the Italian radio and television company RAI that owns the building, stands a monument to the name of Cleopatra. Every surface, except the floor and a long wall of windows, has been decorated in an elaborate scheme. The ceiling is painted to represent a sky, statues are painted on to the walls. A salmon-pinktrompe-l’oeildoubles and replicates architectural detail designed in genuine marble, cold to the touch. The chief images, however, are two frescoes of Antony and Cleopatra by Giambattista Tiepolo. Two complete walls are...

  10. Chapter 4 Spaced out: Cleopatra and the citizen-king
    Chapter 4 Spaced out: Cleopatra and the citizen-king (pp. 77-103)

    With these words Kevin Lynch, in an argument recently taken up by Fredric Jameson, points towards the way landscape can be used both to constitute and signify group identity.² Accepting and developing this notion, however, involves exposing the fact that in the case of modern Paris, the example he actually quotes, the relation between a city and its history is a good deal more evasive than Halbwachs’s sanguine assertion might suggest. It might be more realistic to see in the stable physical scene of Paris a sealing off or cauterization imposed under Louis-Philippe, to censor the record of the past...

  11. Chapter 5 A body for Cleopatra
    Chapter 5 A body for Cleopatra (pp. 104-134)

    Cecil B. de Mille produced his Hollywood version of Cleopatra in 1934, the year after the Vatican head was identified by Ludwig Curtius in Rome.¹ One account of Cleopatra was circulated among a mass audience, the other was available only to the specialist readers of a learned journal. Nevertheless, they are recognizably linked by a common strategy. It is a fantasy of the disrupted female body that governs both narratives. This fragmentation takes a specific and ritualized shape. It also involves substitution. Like the head of the medusa, the head of Cleopatra is made to stand in for the form...

  12. Notes
    Notes (pp. 135-151)
  13. Afterword: Cleopatra in the twenty-first century: The debate over race
    Afterword: Cleopatra in the twenty-first century: The debate over race (pp. 152-159)

    It was a hot London midday in June. Below the steps in front of the British Museum people were milling, driven out of the lecture theatre by a fire alarm. Under cover of the confusion, a woman who had remained silent during the discussion following my talk came up to me. She was angry, outraged by something I had been saying: ‘You know perfectly well it’s not true what you said just now. About Cleopatra and her race.’

    I was taken aback. How could my cautious words have given such offence? They had been so carefully, and I hoped, judiciously...

  14. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 160-168)
  15. Index
    Index (pp. 169-172)
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