ONE OTHER GAUDY NIGHT

I love this painting! I came across it — an image of Cleopatra's suicide — while looking up some stuff about Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra." It took my breath away.

It's by the 17th century Italian Baroque painter Guido Cagnacci. I had never heard of this artist, but here are some choice bits from Wikipedia: He dedicated himself "to private salon paintings, often depicting sensuous naked women from thigh upwards ... His life was at times tempestuous, as characterized by his failed elopement in 1628 with an aristocratic widow. Some contemporaries remark him as eccentric, unreliable and of doubtful morality. He is said to have enjoyed the company of cross-dressing models."

Who better to paint Cleopatra doing, in her words, "that thing that ends all other deeds"?

It's rather amusing that he paints her half-naked when in Shakespeare's play she actually commands her waiting women to dress her to the nines. "Show me like a queen: go fetch my best attires ... Bring our crown and all."

At least Cagnacci gave her a crown, if not the "and all."

And the nakedness, let's admit, is lovely. He must have taken his greater inspiration from Shakespeare's line in Act V: "I know that a woman is a dish for the gods." Indeed. So why not paint her in all her womanliness?

Cleopatra is one of my favorite Shakespearean heroines thus far. She's sassy and smart and passionate. She's getting up there in years, but as Shakespeare says, "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety." As with the best hedonists, her goal isn't emotional maturity, but emotion. When a messenger tells her Antony has married, she beats him senseless; when a messenger tells her Antony's new wife is not pretty, she gives him gold. She's really very easy to get along with, when you think of it. Shakespeare loves to compare monarchs to spoiled children, and he had clearly been beguiled at some point by a spoiled child's charm — the insistence on personal liberty, the love of excess.

Cleopatra is wildly poetic and romantic. The reason she's killing herself with a poisonous snake in that painting is because Antony is dead "and there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon." (That line slays me. I love how Shakespeare never hesitated to give his female characters the most gorgeous lines, which really first stood out to me in "Romeo and Juliet," where Juliet rattles off delicious phrase after delicious phrase.) There will never be another Antony, Cleopatra says. "It's past the size of dreaming."

Cleopatra — "Egypt," as Antony sweetly calls her — kills herself for love of the man whose "legs bestrid the ocean," but also, let's be honest, to save face. She knew that if Caesar captured her alive he would savagely parade her through the capital as the "whore" to whom noble Antony gave his empire for a plaything.

Shall they hoist me up
And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me! rather on Nilus' mud
Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring! rather make
My country's high pyramides my gibbet,
And hang me up in chains!

It's a little hard to imagine the woman in that painting mustering that kind of pep, but I'll take it on faith.