"Cleopatra With the Asp" Oil Painting, After Guido Reni, 19th Century

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19th Century Continental School, after Guido Reni

Cleopatra with the Asp

Oil on board, oval, set within a giltwood frame … Read more 19th Century Continental School, after Guido Reni

Cleopatra with the Asp

Oil on board, oval, set within a giltwood frame with foliate spandrels at the corners.

Sight: 5 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches

Frame: 14 1/4 x 16 1/4 inches

Presented in a period giltwood frame; with hairline cracks visible in the compo ornament at the spandrels, consistent with age.

This finely rendered oval depicts Cleopatra in her final moments, her gaze cast upward in anguished ecstasy as she presses the asp to her breast, her far hand gripping a bunch of drapery at her waist — a gesture closely following Guido Reni's Cleopatra in the Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, datable to 1635-40, the latest of three autograph treatments of the subject by the artist. The present composition simplifies Reni's Pitti prototype, omitting the fig basket and heavy gold mantle of the original in favor of a tighter, more intimate half-figure set against a plain dark curtain, well suited to the small oval format.

Reni's Cleopatra became one of the most admired and widely copied images of the Bolognese Baroque, its heightened pathos and the sitter's face turned skyward in a moment of transcendent suffering appealing strongly to 18th- and 19th-century collectors and copyists alike, who often worked from engravings that stripped away secondary still-life elements to focus on the figure itself. Painted on board, likely by a 19th-century Continental hand, the present work reflects the enduring popularity of this subject among collectors and decorators of the period. The rich giltwood frame, with its foliate spandrels, is consistent with 19th-century French or Continental framing traditions for cabinet-scale pictures of this kind. See less