WOMAN IN ART
glided down the years and down the Nile, till we find the Ptolemys on the throne and on the shore of the Middle Sea. Invasions weakened the integrity of Egypt and her sovereigns. Her antiquity and glory were to be supplanted. Rome was the scourge whereby the derelict Ptolemys were to be sunk into oblivion and Egypt lie waste for an eon or two.
Look at a native carving of the last queen, who disrupted Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Early portraits of the Egyptian-Greek period hint of the appearance of women of that age and country. We note the change from the purely Egyptian, in both art and features, toward the refinement of Greek influences.
True to the manners and customs of that age, Jean Leon Gerome, of French instinct and training, painted "Cleopatra Before Caesar." The amorous queen is adorned with stomacher, girdle, bracelets and necklace of jewels, while a silver-wrought drapery of gauze falls from the girdle over the thigh, parted to show the curves of the limbs. She stands in the hall of her ancestors, the walls representing in hieroglyphics Egyptian Pharaohs and their Greek conquerors, the Ptolemys. The Queen exposes her physical charms to the Roman Caesar because of a political purpose and passion. It was not the custom of those women to go nude, but thinly clad, often bare to the waist. Men of the middle class went nude to the waist, and children were accustomed to a state of nudity. Morals were questionable. Caesar's presence in the Nile valley signified the waning power of the Greek dynasty.
Cleopatra's slave has his hands on the leopard skin to cover the Queen in an instant, at pressure of her finger on his back.
In Browning's poem, "Fifne," he has described this scene perfectly, and in three words characterized the picture: "One Thievish Glance," for it applies to every figure on the canvas, to the voluptuous woman, to the Caesar, to his attending nobles, and to the slave.
The artist has portrayed a woman of the highest rank. She is Queen of the oldest civilization on earth.
Debased by passion and by power—
Nor hath the wit to know
She lacks the sense of purity,
'Twas not engendered in her breed.
Virtue had not yet come to birth,
For pagan Rome sceptered the earth.
With her last agonies
Millenniums of Egypt's power
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