cleopatrabeforecaesar

Our reproduction of Gerome's Cleopatra

Cleopatra Before Caesar is one of Gerome’s most famous masterpieces.   In it, he portrayed the persecuted eighteen year old queen of Egypt, Cleopatra VII, suddenly emerging from a rolled carpet brought into the general’s presence by her slave. Julius Caesar had landed in Egypt on October 2, 48 BCE while Cleopatra was attempting to regain her throne from her younger brother, Ptolemy, who had previously ousted her.

Apparently Caesar was charmed by the gesture, as the following morning Ptolemy arrived to find Caesar and Cleopatra greeting him together.  He was arrested, and soon Caesar and Cleopatra were engaged with Ptolemy’s adherents in the Alexandrian War.  This was yet another struggle in the series of wars that culminated in the end of the Roman Republic 18 years later.

About the Artist:

Born in eastern France in 1824, Jean-Leon Gerome is considered one of the masters of the Academic style of painting, and is renown for his refined treatment of classical subjects: Diogenes, the Death of Caesar, and Pollice Verso among them.  He maintained a prodigious output and became widely recognized as a major artistic figure in France, Germany and Britain.

The Academic Style:

Taking its example from the Renaissance Florentine Academy of the Medicis and the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was founded in 1648.  Its purpose was to distinguish artists from artisans and later became the Academie des Beaux-arts, spread the Academic ideal across Europe, and eventually inspired the founding of the Royal Academy in Britain and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, among others.

These academies later molded and developed a style of painting which aimed at a synthesis of the earlier Neoclassicist and Romanticist traditions.  Prior to their creation, French artists in the later Seventeenth century became embroiled in an argument as to whether Rubens or Poussin was the preferred master.  The adherents of Rubens eventually became known as Romanticists and emphasized the use of color in an appeal to nature and the emotions. The followers of Poussin preferred to concentrate their painting on lines and forms and became known later as Neoclassicists.  The debate continued in the Nineteenth century over the Neoclassicism of Ingres versus the Romanticism of Delacroix.  The Academies, desiring order and unity within the community of artists, fostered their own style which attempted to unite these conflicting movements.

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