Dali House

Asp-irants, from left, Elizabeth Taylor, Amanda Barrie and Claudette Colbert.

I’ve been intrigued by Cleopatra ever since Liz Taylor poured herself into a gilt bustier and flimsy silk for Joseph Mankiewicz’s epic 1963 movie, but adolescent cravings aside, she was one helluva woman. (Cleopatra, not Liz.) (Well, okay, Liz too.)

The Guardian got me lusting – that is to say, thinking – about Cleo again recently with an essay by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, author of “Cleopatra: Queen, Lover, Legend”. Her depictions in art, not to mention the movies, warrant a quick whip round Egypt. Mind the camels – they spit in your general direction.

The daughter of one of Alexander’s generals and the last queen of Egypt, Shakespeare’s “serpent of old Nile” came close to sinking Rome before it got up its full steam. She married twice, both times to her brothers, one of whom died in battle against her, the other possibly murdered on her orders.

This is Michelangelo’s Cleo, one of many drawings he gave to Tommaso Cavalieri. Tommy boy gave it in turn, rather reluctantly, to Duke Cosimo I dei Medici. Those troublesome Medicis do keep cropping up; there’s another one renting a room at Dali House soon.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, as usual using more details per pixel than anyone else, still surprises Caesar with Cleo tumbling from her carpet.

It’s well established that Cleopatra and Mark Antony cooked up a political alliance between the sheets, but history’s gossips sought a more lurid complexity. Antony was cast as a hedonist and traitor, “willing to give up his chance of ruling Rome in order to enjoy the pleasures of her bed,” in Hughes-Hallett’s words.

Here, supine in mortality by Pietro Ricci, and below, rather enjoying the fatal bite actually, in Baron Jean Baptiste Regnault’s version, circa 1790.

By the time Cecil B de Mille got his hands on Cleopatra, tempting Claudette Colbert “to play the wickedest woman in history”, the Egyptian had been one of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Good Women” (1380), a paragon of feminine virtue; a pearl-slurping, asp-bitten slut to the Renaissance painter-pornographers; a matter of marital hierarchy to the English and German playwrights who followed Shakespeare; an enemy of the American and French revolutionaries; pretty much all things to all people.

“The storyline shifts. So does Cleopatra’s appearance,” H-H writes. “For several hundred years she was blonde. She was a famous beauty, and so mediaeval poets ascribed all the conventional attributes of beauty to her: hair like spun gold, sky-blue eyes and breasts ‘as white as ivory billiard balls’.”

Click the image to see the full painting.

This is a detail from “The Banquet of Cleopatra” by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, from the 1740s, a painting that somewhat surprisingly resides in Melbourne, Australia. Quite apart from the jarring historical misplacement, her world-shifting conspiracy with Antony almost gets lost among the costumes, the food and the tinest dog anyone’s ever seen, not to mention the dwarf. I tell you he was crazy, that Tiepolo.

A century later Napoleon discovered Egypt for France and Eugene Delacroix painted Cleo as some sort of gypsy in “Cleopatra and the Peasant”, grabbing the moment at which the queen, in Roman custody, first contemplates suicide when a poisonous snake is smuggled into her cell. “Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus there that kills and pains not?” as Shakespeare reckoned she must have said.

Servants weep for the bitten queen in Guido Cagnacci’s stirring view from about 1700.

The gypsy characterisation was the beginning of Cleo’s Turkish-dancing-girl phase, which proved so popular it’s never been fully abandoned, and in fact she only got raunchier as time went on. Sarah Bernhardt had a bit of striptease written into her stage depiction.

Something a lot more recent and ever so romantic – dunno who it’s by, though.

There was also Cleopatra the femme fatale, poisoning the housekeeping help, and George Bernard Shaw’s Cleopatra the petulant teenager, but Hollywood had its own ideas – or rather idea. People have been making movies about the Egyptian siren ever since they learned how to turn the little crank on the side of the camera, and there are countless Cleo films, but her personality has never varied that much.

Madeleine Roch went first in a 1910 French film, then Helen Gardner took the role to America in 1912. The 1917 version with Theda Bara bombed despite the star power, because, says H-H, “In a world where young men were being slaughtered en masse [in World War I], the femme fatale was redundant.”

From left, Sarah Bernhardt, Theda Bara and Vivien Leigh.

The Yanks tried again in 1920, the French again in 1928 with Dorothy Revier. Then came DeMille’s 1934 rendition with a flirtatious Claudette Colbert, which – if you only count movies titled “Cleopatra”, as opposed to “Antony and Cleopatra” or, say, “Return of the 50-Foot Cleopatra” – remained the definitive version right up to 1945, when Vivien Leigh brought to the part, so critic Kenneth Tynan said, “the daintiness of a debutante called upon to dismember a stag”.

Brazil had a go in 1962 with Elisio de Albuquerque, but then that was eclipsed the following year by Joseph L Mankiewicz’s Taylor-and-Burton monument, six hours long but trimmed to three under duress.

In 1970 Michel Auder directed a Warhol version with Viva, in 1999 there was a TV film with Chilean actress Leonor Varela, in 2003 a Czech turn with Monika Absolonova, and earlier this Brazil returned to the story with Alessandra Negrini in the lead.

There are dozens more variations on the theme, but again, we’re not counting a 2003 flick dubbed “the Latin American Thelma and Louise” or “Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatre” or “Cleopatra Jones” or even “Cleopatra Wong”. We would be remiss, however, to ignore “Carry on Cleo”, with Amanda Barrie, in which a pair of direspectfully fun Britons are enslaved by dragged off to Rome, where one of them is mistakenly drafted into Cleopatra’s Royal Guard. Good for a smile on the Nile, but I’m standing by Liz Taylor, as close as possible without alerting security.

A load more of Cleo in art is here.