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Statuette of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt

after Tiziano Aspetti (Padua c.1559 - Pisa 1606)

Category

Art / Sculpture

Date

c. 1600 - 1650

Materials

Bronze

Measurements

165 x 38 mm; 32 mm (L)

Place of origin

Venice

Order this image

Collection

The Argory, County Armagh

NT 565231

Summary

Sculpture, bronze; statuette of Cleopatra; Tiziano Aspetti (c.1559 - 1606); model c.1600, cast Venetian, c.1600 - 1650. A small statuette of a woman, identifiable as the Egyptian ruler Cleopatra (69 - 30 B.C.) by the serpent that twists around her right arm. A typical example of the statuettes of deities and other subjects that were reproduced in large numbers in Venetian foundries from the seventeenth century onwards, using models by sculptors such as the Paduan-born Tiziano Aspetti. The figure of Cleopatra is paired at the Argory with a statuette of Mars. Although they work well together, the different forms of the bases suggests that they were probably not originally intended to be a pair.

Full description

A small bronze statuette depicting Cleopatra, queen of Egypt (69-30 B.C.), naked but for a large swag of drapery which is held on to her body by means of a strap running over her left shoulder and across her body to her right hip. She grasps a section of the drapery with her left hand, so that it falls over her left thigh, thereby covering her genitalia, whilst the greater part of the drape falls behind her and down to the ground. She stands in a strong contrapposto pose, her right leg forwards and her body twisting round to her left. Around her right arm, which she holds up to her left breast, coils a snake. On an integral rectangular bronze base. Cleopatra was the last ruler in the Egyptian dynasty of the Ptolemies. Famed for her beauty, her love affair with Julius Caesar resulted in a son, Caesarion. Cleopatra travelled to Rome with Caesar, but returned to Egypt following his assassination in 44. There she would meet Caesar’s former general and associate Mark Antony, leading to one of the most famous love affairs in history. After the couple were defeated by Octavian at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., Antony eventually killed himself whilst Cleopatra, rather than being carried a captive to Rome, put an end to her own life through the poison of an asp snake. With the end of the Ptolemies, Egypt became a Roman province. During the Renaissance period, Cleopatra regularly figured in the canon of ‘virtuous women’, figures such as Dido, Eurydice and Lucretia, all of whom came to a tragic end, usually at their own hands. More than most of these virtuous heroines, Cleopatra has long been seen as an ambiguous figure, both queen and courtesan, noble heroine and sensuous beauty. This ambivalence perhaps helps to explain her naked appearance in this statuette. Like its companion at the Argory, the little bronze statuette of Mars, god of war (NT 565230), this little bronze figure is in the style of Tiziano Aspetti, one of the leading sculptors working in Padua and Venice in the decades leading up to 1600. Born in Padua, from around 1577 Aspetti was recorded as living in Venice in the palace of the patrician Giovanni Grimani, who seems to have been a personal friend. He may well also as a young man have travelled to central Italy, including Florence and Rome, since his work suggests a close familiarity with the sculpture of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1563) and Giovanni Bologna (Giambologna, 1529-1608). Aspetti’s first secure work, made c. 1587/88, is a relief with the Forge of Vulcan on a chimneypiece in the Doge’s Palace in Venice. He sculpted monumental statues for the Ducal Palace, as well as a statue of a giant for the Mint (Zecca) in Venice. From the 1590s Tiziano Aspetti began to work in bronze, executing a pair of reliefs depicting the martyrdom of Saint Daniel for the Cathedral in Padua, as well as the bronze sculptures for the tomb of Saint Anthony of Padua in the Basilica of Saint Anthony. Aspetti died in 1606 in Pisa, in the course of a trip to Tuscany, to order marble from the quarries at Carrara. Most of Tiziano Aspetti’s single figure compositions depict powerful muscular bodies in exaggerated contrapposto poses, whilst the figures also have rather small heads, as seen here in the Cleopatra. His best-known single figures are a larger figure of Mars, who is often paired with a figure of Venus (Kryza-Gersch 2001). Casts of the larger Mars and Venus were often used to surmount andirons or firedogs. A large figure of Apollo at Anglesey Abbey (NT 515026), known in just a single version, was probably made as an andiron figure, paired with a now lost figure of Apollo’s sister, the goddess Diana. The Argory figure is clearly related to figures of the naked goddess Venus that are mainly attributed to Tiziano Aspetti, such as a Venus marina, showing the goddess with a dolphin, formerly in the Staatliche Museen in Berlin. This small figure was a pair to the Mars in that museum and like it, was attributed to Aspetti by Leo Planiscig (Planiscig 1921, p. 583, Abb. 643; Bode 1930, p. 53, no. 258, Taf. 72). With a height of 15.5 cms., the Venus Marina in Berlin was about the same height as the Cleopatra; also like the Mars, a version was once in the collection of the Dutch collector Jacob de Wilde (1645-1721), published in a catalogue in 1700, with engravings by Jacob’s daughter Maria de Wilde (Wilde 1700, Pl. 23). A similar small figure of Venus is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (Planiscig 1924, no.202). There are also quite a number of versions of the figure at a larger size, including examples in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Allen et al 2022, no. 75) and in the Musei Civici in Padua (Banzato and Pellegrini 1989, no. 72). Many of these larger figures were made to adorn firedogs, paired with figures of Mars or of Venus’s husband, Vulcan (Motture 2003, pp. 283-84, fig. 7). They depend from a stone figure on the balustrade of the Marciana Library in Venice, which was made between 1588 and 1590 by the sculptor Girolamo Campagna (1549-1625). The bronze derivations of the Venus Marina are usually as a result attributed by some schiolars to Campagna and by others to Aspetti but, in truth, it is very difficult to attribute these figures, which were reproduced in large numbers in the many foundries operating in Venice in the decades around 1600. Although it is close to the larger figures of the Venus marina, the Cleopatra at the Argory is by no means a simple derivation; apart from the position of the right arm, there is a more pronounced twist to the woman’s body. This interesting figure also appears to be unique, with no other surviving versions currently known. The juxtaposition of Mars and Cleopatra, a god with an historical figure, does not make sense iconographically or historically. Although both figures may be cast from models originally by Tiziano Aspetti, the Cleopatra is equipped with a rectangular rather than circular base, suggesting that the two figures, although they may have been together for a long time, were not necessarily conceived as a pair. Standing about 16 cms. high, they are also too small to have been used on firedogs, but a little too large for figures made for mounting on cabinets. They may simply have been made as independent statuettes. However, the model of the Mars was employed as the central figure in a Venetian bronze doorknocker. Whilst the models for the two figures at the Argory may well have been made by Tiziano Aspetti himself, the bronzes are likely to have been cast in one of the many foundries operating in Venice in the seventeenth century. Jeremy Warren October 2022

Provenance

By descent; Walter McGeough Bond (1908-86), by whom given to the National Trust in 1979.

Makers and roles

after Tiziano Aspetti (Padua c.1559 - Pisa 1606), sculptor

References

Wilde 1700: Signa Antiqua e Museo Jacobi de Wilde veterum poetarum carminibus illustrate et per Mariam filiam aeri inscripta, Amsterdam 1700 Planiscig 1921: Leo Planiscig, Venezianische Bildhauer der Renaissance, Vienna 1921 Planiscig 1924: Leo Planiscig, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien: Die Bronzeplastiken, Statuetten, Reliefs, Geräte und Plaketten, Vienna 1924 Bode 1930: Wilhelm von Bode, Die italienischen Bildwerke der Renaissance und des Barock II. Bronzestatuetten, Büsten und Gebrauchsgegenstände, Berlin 1930 Banzato and Pellegrini 1989: Davide Banzato and Francesca Pellegrini, Musei Civici di Padova. Bronzi e placchette, Padua 1989 Motture 2003: Peta Motture, ‘The Production of Firedogs in Renaissance Venice’ in Peta Motture, ed., Large Bronzes in the Renaissance, Washington DC 2003, pp. 276-307 Allen at al 2022: Denise Allen et al, eds., Italian Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum, New York 2022 (also published online)

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