Death of Cleopatra

After the defeat at the battle of Actium and after Anthony had killed himself, the Egyptian queen chose suicide by viper bite to avoid the shame of falling prisoner to the Romans. Unlike the Baroque precursors, we do not see her in the throes of death, and only the snake to the left alludes to the way she was to die. The three corpses seem to have frozen into stone thanks to the use of bleak incarnate. In contrast to Poussin’s scene of Germanicus on his death bed, Regnault’s drama does not evidence any emotional echo in the guise of ancillary figures mourning. The finality of extinguished life is presented as if in the limelight on stage. The blind absorption of the dead allows us to view them without being disturbed. With the queen and her arm hanging down Regnault quotes David’s Death of Marat (1793, Brussels). The painting was produced in the ‘5th Year of the Republic’ and was read as an expression of resignation in the face of the bloodshed of the French Revolution. (Bettina Baumgärtel)