The Death of Cleopatra, oil on canvas, 108 x 142 cm, framed

We are grateful to Nicholas Turner for confirming the attribution of the present painting after examining it in the original.

There are good historical and stylistic reasons for believing that this Death of Cleopatra is the painting, previously lost, for which Girolamo Panesi paid Guercino slightly over 132 scudi on 8th March, 1650.(1) Guercino’s normal charge for a whole-length figure at this date in his career was 150 scudi, i.e. some 20 scudi less than the amount charged here. But we know from a list of commissions written in Guercino’s own hand on a loose sheet inserted at the back of his Account Book that this particular figure of Cleopatra was indeed a whole-length, since it is listed, under the year 1650, as “la Cleopatra del Panesse, figura intiera ...”.(2) 

The Genoese nobleman and art dealer Girolamo Panesi (frequently misspelled “Pavesi” or “Pavese” in the early sources) was settled in Rome.(3) He was a friend of Guercino, as well as one of the painter’s most important clients during his late period. In Pier Francesco Mola’s amusing caricature of Panesi viewing a double portrait, the dealer’s rampant pose and critical gaze suggest a dominating presence in which the diminutive Mola, who holds up the canvas for inspection, seems far from comfortable (fig. 1).(4) How Panesi persuaded the financially astute Guercino to give him a discount on the many pictures he ordered from him remains unclear. Rarely one to be caught on the wrong side of a deal, the painter simply provided his friend with finished canvases that were a little smaller than his standard-sizes.(5) The reductions—apparent only to someone familiar with the painter’s work—would have enabled Panesi to increase his profit margin on the re-sale of the pictures in Rome, as he would have asked a full Guercino price when selling such a picture. Malvasia records how a Lot and his Daughters, painted for Panesi in 1651 (though commissioned earlier), was immediately despatched to Rome and others commissioned from the painter were probably sent there too.(6) Since the Cleopatra is in a contemporary Roman frame, unusual for works Guercino’s from his mature period, Panesi himself may well have had it framed.

In Guercino’s Cleopatra painted for Panesi, he naturally referred back to his larger rendering of the subject, painted two years earlier on the commission of Monsignore Carlo Emanuelle Durazzo and now in the Galleria d’Arte del Comune, Palazzo Rosso, Genoa, for which the painter was paid 156 scudi (fig. 2).(7) Other ideas were taken from details from preparatory drawings for his earlier picture.(8) Guercino has also used many of the same stage props—the linen covered mattress, the double cushions against which Cleopatra reclines and the curtains, with deep, angular folds, that hang down from the corners to either side; but at the same time he has brought a completely different atmosphere to the subject, augmenting Cleopatra’s erotic charge by showing her lying rather than sitting and broadening the range of colours and textures in the lavish setting in which she is placed.

The grandiose atmosphere is enriched by the juxtaposition of the complimentary colours of green and purple. These, together with the white sheets of the mattress on which Cleopatra lies, illuminate this luxurious but tragic bower. The silk covered counterpane, with one side purple and the other green, is also fringed with purple. Only partly covering her naked body, its disarray creates a beautiful play of shimmering colour and abstract shapes. The two heavy cushions on which rests Cleopatra’s head are edged and tasselled in red, while their covers take up the chromatic theme of purple versus green, the two blending iridescently in a changeant effect.

Only a year before, Guercino had painted a pair of pictures, in each of which a biblical story is being played out in front of an equally ceremonious bed, similarly well equipped with white sheets and rich awnings. They are Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (fig. 3) and Amnon Expelling Tamar, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.(9) In the first picture, Potiphar’s wife is especially close in type to the Cleopatra here, with her finely coiffed and tightly plaited blonde hair held with a decorated hair-band at the back of her head. The women in both pictures wear a pendant pearl ear-ring, mounted in gold (in the Cleopatra this rhymes with the tear rolling down her cheek) and share nearly identical features and complexions.
As the snake bites her side, drawing blood, Cleopatra raises up her left hand in dramatic resignation, her fingers silhouetted against the dark space behind. She strikes a more flamboyant figure in contrast to her more passive counterpart in the painting in Genoa. A possible reason for this more expansive treatment of the subject may have been Guercino’s recollection of the figure of Andromeda that he painted in the Perseus Freeing Andromeda, of 1648, formerly in the Palazzo Balbi Senarega, Genoa.(10) Here, the terrified Andromeda, chained to a rock, raises both hands in alarm, clutching a drapery in her right and showing the flat of her left hand, with her fingers spread out, in a gesture akin to that of Cleopatra’s in the present canvas.

We are grateful to Nicholas Turner for cataloguing the present painting.

Notes:
1). B. Ghelfi (ed.), Il libro dei conti del Guercino 1629–1666, Bologna 1997, p. 146, no. 420. The commission is also mentioned by Conte Carlo Cesare Malvasia: “Una Cleopatra moribonda al sig. Girolamo Pavese da Genova” (Felsina Pittrice, 1841, II, p. 267).
2). Ghelfi, 1997, p. 223: 77. recto.
3). For Panesi’s activity as a dealer, especially his commissions from Guercino, are discussed by N. Turner, Mola’s Caricature Portrait of the Genoese Collector and Dealer Gerolamo Panesi, in: Master Drawings, XLVII, no. 4, 2009, p. 518.
4). Turner, 2009, pp. 516-17.
5). Ghelfi, 1997, p. 35. In her note item no 536 in the Account Book, Panesi’s commission for four half-length pictures, paid for on 29 August, 1638, Ghelfi explains that Panesi paid a slightly lower price than Guercino’s standard charge for a half-length canvas and that all four paintings commissioned—the David, and an Assumption of the Virgin, a St Cecilia and a St Veronica (of which the David and the St Cecilia are known, one recently on the Paris art market and the other in a private collection, Naples)—must have been slightly smaller in size.
6). Malvasia, 1841, II, p. 269.
7). L. Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino, Rome, 1988, p. 325, no. 252; and D. Mahon, Catalogo critico, in: Giovanni Francesco Barbieri Il Guercino 1591–1666, exh. cat. Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna, and Pinacoteca Civica and Chiesa del Rosario, Cento, September to November, 1991, pp. 310-11, no. 117.
8). For example, Cleopatra’s limp right arm and hand, in which she holds the asp, is taken in reverse from the left arm in a drawing for the 1648 Cleopatra, formerly in a private collection, New York (sale, Christie’s, New York, 24th January, 2008, lot 30).
9). Salerno, 1988, pp. 332-33, nos. 261-62. 10). Salerno, 1988, p. 327, no. 254.