The Suicide of Cleopatra

Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic queen of Egypt, was defeated in the war against Octavian. To avoid being taken to Rome as a slave, she is said to have killed herself with the bite of a venomous snake. Scholarship doubts whether that really happened. Yet the idea of her death by snakebite inspired many artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of them was Rubens’s pupil Willem Panneels, who made a painting of the subject and reproduced it in this etching. The print’s inscription attributes the design to Rubens.