Signs of Cleopatra: Reading an Icon Historically

"This study chooses a number of key moments from European history in which writers and painters re-imagined Cleopatra. In doing so Mary Hamer takes her readers on a pleasurable intellectual treasure hunt. By restoring these works to their original context - political, philosophical and aesthetic - the author opens up unexpected new readings of images and texts which had previously appeared self-explanatory." "Using detailed analysis Hamer traces attempts to reconfigure attitudes to women and power, to women and sexuality and to desire itself. In the case of Tiepolo's Cleopatra, the Queen is linked with the desire for knowledge; in post-Revolutionary France, with a lost political freedom. In the new concluding essay she explores what is at stake in our own day, in the battle to define Cleopatra's race."--Jacket.