Cleopatra

This old and exceptionally rare engraving depicts the suicide of Cleopatra, following Antony’s defeat and suicide at the Battle of Actium in 30 BCE. Its artist, Jan Harmensz Muller, was one of the greatest practitioners in the remarkable flourishing of engraving in the Northern Netherlands in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He was a probable pupil, and later almost certainly a rival, of Hendrik Goltzius and also a contemporary of Jan Sadeler. Like Sadeler, he was on the move, working in Italy and later Prague, where he was a principal artist to Emperor Rudolf II and struck up a close relationship with Bartholomeus Spranger, before returning to his native Amsterdam. Few of his prints (about 20) are based on his original designs and this is one. Dating from c. 1592, it shows how Muller ‘mastered and applied with great virtuosity Goltzius’s volumetric engraving technique based on swelling and diminishing lines’ (<em>Grove Art Online</em>). Jan Kok, the leading Muller scholar, refers to his ‘dizzying array of sinuous hatching and broad swelling lines’ and his ‘robustly muscled nudes in fantastic postures’. Cleopatra, as she yields to despair, pressing one of the asps to her breast, while the other eagerly follows.

Muller was also a very close contemporary of Shakespeare (slightly younger but this print pre-dates Antony and Cleopatra by about 12-14 years), so this would augment our modest holdings of visual material relating to the author and could be linked to the text (V, ii): ‘Come, thou mortal wretch,/ With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate/ Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool/ Be angry and dispatch.’

See: http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/artists/543/jan-harmensz-muller-dutch-1571-1628/

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art          February 2017