Egypt by Christina Riggs

Author:Christina Riggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2017-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

The beautiful and the dead

The vogue for paintings inspired by ancient Egypt, like those of Alma-Tadema, Poynter and Long, was not limited to Britain by any means. It was widespread throughout Europe and wherever artists trained in European-style painting. Scenes from ancient history were often a sideline of painters who specialized in the so-called Orientalist style (the nineteenth-century term repurposed by Said), which favoured North African and Middle Eastern subjects such as crowded, crumbling streetscapes; markets, mosques or desert caravans; and the ever-popular harem or hammam, both of which offered an excuse for painting naked women. These subjects owed just as much to painters’ imaginations as did their depictions of ancient Egypt or the Holy Land. No one painted the new railway stations of Cairo and Damascus, for instance, or upper-class Egyptian ladies dressed in the latest Parisian fashion. Like the props in Alma-Tadema’s studio or the antiquities he studied for his paintings, time could be mixed and matched or shifted around, so that Egypt was never allowed to be as modern or ‘advanced’ as the West – and for women, even royal women like Cleopatra, clothing was optional.

European artists had been depicting Cleopatra for centuries, and earlier images of her make for an interesting contrast with later versions in the Orientalist mode. With little direct knowledge of Egyptian sites or antiquities to go on, painters tended to treat Cleopatra as they would any other figure from ancient history. Both her suicide, recounted by Plutarch, and her love of luxury, emphasized by Pliny the Elder, inspired the choice of scenes. The seventeenth-century Bolognese painter Guido Reni painted several versions of Cleopatra gazing heavenward as she clasped an asp to her décolleté, but he also used Cleopatra as a portrait mode for the wives of patrons who no doubt wished to be associated with her vast wealth. About 1744 Giambattista Tiepolo painted a cycle of frescoes showing episodes of Cleopatra’s life from both Pliny and Plutarch. Decorating the reception hall of the Palazzo Labia, Venice, these frescoes likewise emphasized the Egyptian queen’s riches and munificence, a luxury to which the successful merchants of this key trading port with the East could easily aspire. Tiepolo depicted Cleopatra, and all the other figures in the frescoes, as a noblewoman of his present day, elaborately costumed, coiffed and bejewelled. The only gesture to the ancient setting of the scenes was the Classical architecture, fitting to the genre of history paintings in the eighteenth century and to the era in which Cleopatra lived.

Before the Napoleonic expedition and subsequent opening of Egypt, artists in Europe had had few references for ancient Egyptian buildings and works of art, apart from obelisks, a few sculptures and small objects in old princely collections. As we saw in the last chapter, the appearance of Vivant Denon’s travel account, and many others, provided ample source material for artists to copy and adapt, as did the eventual publication of the Description. Artists who travelled to Egypt themselves – like David Roberts, whose

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