Queen $h!t
Carving a Renaissance for the Black Female Body Through The Death of Cleopatra
Edmonia Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra is a visual masterpiece and a feat of sculptural craft (figure 1). The figure physically confronts the viewer with a head on scene, standing at just over five feet tall, three feet wide, and almost four feet in depth. The monarch is fixed in stone in the moments immediately following the venomous snake bite that will ultimately lead to her death, depicting her growing state of paralysis. She is reclining, her royal wardrobe falling gently from her body and her throne as she begins to succumb to the toxins.
Lewis offers us a view of the queen’s face, her neck craned backward and established firmly on the back of her throne. Her face is soft and accepting, her brow slightly furrowed, her lips separated slightly. Her eyes are gently closed and permanently cemented in their alabaster condition, rolling backward in her skull. Cleopatra’s cheeks are full and round, not yet fallen from the absence of life. Her headdress is still placed securely on her head and drapes gently against her royal seat. As it melts into the corners of her silhouette and slopes into her left shoulder, her crown is still aligned perfectly with the full, round button of her nose. Her lips are slightly parted, no longer drawing breath, yet continuing to battle with gravity as they stay married to one another at the corners.
Lewis has situated Cleopatra as an immortal vision of royalty and supremacy with every flourish of her decorative setting. The throne on which Cleopatra’s corpse reclines is chiseled with ornate designs of floral inspiration. They serve to frame her in a permanent garden of paralysis. The sides of the throne mark the scene as historic, lined with hieroglyphs only meant to be deciphered upon a change of viewpoint. The arms of her throne are under the watchful guard of two monarchical faces, believed to be the representation of her two sons, eternally confronting onlookers of the scene.
Cleopatra’s posture is tense yet heavy, her back arching flush against the seat backing while her arms and head hang naturally. Her left arm is separated slightly from her body and bent marginally at her elbow while her right arm rests limply in her lap. It is adorned with an embossed and studded cuff at her bicep. Her right hand is wrapped softly, yet securely around the snake that was the vehicle of her demise. Her left hand floats lifelessly over the arm of the throne, with her index finger parted from the rest of the digits. They seem, conversely, drawn together by the magnetism of her wedding ring. Cleopatra’s queenly status is reinforced with the inclusion of not just one, but two necklaces, one of which is beaded and rests high upon her neck, as if rising out of her skin. The other necklace is lower, burdened with the weight of a pendant that rests centrally and securely over her still heart.
Lewis gave the queen the respect of a royal through her handling of the drapery. The garment Cleopatra wears is thin yet overflowing, swooping from behind her back and rippling down her left shoulder. It collects in a pool between her thighs before it slides off the left arm of the throne, landing softly at the base and hovering over the foot of the pedestal as it reveals the familiar floral ornaments of the throne’s structure. Her dress is delicate and loose as it sits below her chest on the right side, exposing her breast as she takes a final breath. Cleopatra’s gown continues down her legs where it puddles at her feet and slides off the base of the throne and onto the floor. Cleopatra’s feet are unequal in position, the left foot ebbing closer to the viewer than the right with an air of action paused only by stone. They rest comfortably on a decorative pillow, quilted along the edges, and trimmed with fringe. An inscription leads the viewer out of the time portal and back to reality. Engraved on the front of the base of the throne are the words: The Death of Cleopatra.
The subject of Cleopatra was incredibly popular in contemporary art and literature during the nineteenth century. She was highly favorable among creators and patrons alike. Many historical interpretations of her life were circulating in popular culture during the 1800s, most notably in Shakespeare’s plays and accounts of her life written by Greco-Roman historians, politicians, and scholars. Cleopatra had both political and romantic relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, two ancient Roman leaders. Her time as ruler of Egypt recounts many battles for wealth, territory, and power. After a devastating loss to Octavius in the battle of Actium, rather than allow herself to be paraded through the streets of Rome in shackles, she took her own life, presumably with the help of two chamber maids and a venomous snake.
Lewis was not the only Neoclassical sculptor to tackle this iconic and heroic scene. William Wetmore Story, a renowned American nineteenth century artist and writer, sculpted his own Cleopatra (figure 2) in 1869, almost a decade before Lewis’s construction of the same subject. Story’s Cleopatra is striking in contrast to Lewis’s interpretation of the monarch. His depiction focuses on her contemplating suicide, rather than the act itself.
Story’s sculpture is also slightly underwhelming in size compared to Lewis’s, standing at only four and a half feet in height, almost three feet in width, and just above four feet in depth. Cleopatra is depicted in a relaxed recline, seemingly contemplating her next move as her head rests firmly in her right hand. She finds support against a decorative bench, the ornate arm stretching up from the seat to catch the underside of her forearm as she continues to mull over her choices. Story’s chair also diverges from the furniture that Lewis created. Story left a great deal of negative space between the chair arm and Cleopatra’s body, creating a scene that severely lacks the regality Lewis created with her throne.
It would be a disservice not to note the elements in both Story’s and Lewis’s sculptures that are similar in terms of design and execution, from the details in the jewelry and clothing, to the placement of her feet. However, the most notable difference between these two historic representations is in the way each artist chose to depict Cleopatra’s likeness. Most likely influenced by nineteenth century dialogues surrounding Cleopatra’s ethnic and racial identity, Story chose to figure the queen as a recognizably black woman. He carved her lips as full and wide and gave her a prominent nose, turning it down at the end with nostrils that spread generously on either side. These are clear markings of the physiognomy of an African person, a likeness represented well in nineteenth century America as the lowest class of citizenship with depictions of black American women as hyper-sexualized, grotesque creatures. Some scholars and professionals even argued that black and white individuals differed as species entirely.
Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra offers the monarch a much more “Greek” (or white) racial interpretation, with Lewis taking inspiration directly from medals and coins retrieved from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt as “souvenirs.” While her lips remain fuller in comparison to contemporary Greek portrayals of Cleopatra, they are drastically narrower in width, and her nose is particularly angular, as well as pinched at the tip to form a recognizably European button nose.
Lewis and Story both came to predominate in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, around the same time that debates about the ethics of slavery were reaching a fever pitch. While the abolitionists and those in similar camps wanted to claim Cleopatra’s racial status as an African woman in order to establish similarities between royalty and black Americans, those in favor or defense of slavery referred to historic accounts and depictions of the queen as Greek or at the very least, non-black. Although Lewis was very clearly aligned with the support of the black American struggle, her depiction of Cleopatra as a “classical racial figure” serves as a defiant stand against contemporary thoughts on black femininity and black female sexuality.
Mary Edmonia Lewis states her birthday as July 4th, 1844. She was born to a Native Ojibwe and African American mother and an African American father in Greenbush, New York[1]. She is recognized throughout the art historical canon as the first black sculptor (of any gender) to gain significant recognition for her craft during her lifetime. Lewis spent the majority of her career learning, creating, and working with several women artists and art patrons in Rome as a member of the “White Marmorean Flock.” While the commonly recognized name for this group of professionals emerged from the sarcastic musings of a male artist, Rome did indeed provide a sort of safe haven away from the phallic oppression of their male contemporaries for most of the women working there. However, it would be naive to assume that Lewis was able to easily integrate into this group without a great deal of tribulations that stemmed from her black-Native identity, even among other women. In The Color of Stone, Charmaine A. Nelson thoroughly investigates Lewis's experience as a black creator among a class of all white female artists and notes that while Lewis and her contemporaries were alike in many ways, “she was also unquestionably and remarkably different from them in her racial identifications and subjectivity…[she experienced] profound and far-reaching implications [regarding] her artistic production.” [2]
By her own declaration– according to her passport application– Lewis lived her life as a recognizably African American woman, describing her complexion as black. [3]Such an experience had its own complex difficulties across the globe during the nineteenth century, but especially so in America as the conversation surrounding slavery/abolition in the states grew to a boiling point. Enslaved black women were subject to horrendous acts of physical and sexual violence committed against them by their white male enslavers, and this violence did not end after emancipation. The “relationships” between black women and their abusers developed into the narrative that black women were the instigators of their own violence, tantalizing and seducing good, Christian, white men into staying away from their righteous unions with their wives.
Depictions of black women during this time were unflattering, animalistic, hypersexualized, and downright grotesque in some instances. The majority of these depictions were the exact opposite of contemporary womanhood and feminine beauty that upheld the standards of “the Cult of True Womanhood” – an idea discussed in Kristen Pai Buick’s essay, “Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis Invoking and Inverting Autobiography.” [4]These ideals policed femininity during the nineteenth century. Lewis would have been aware of depictions such as the Virginian Salve (figure 3), an illustration produced by John Tenniel as a parody to the Greek Slave. Nelson examines the image as an almost exact opposite to its influence as Hiram Powers’s famed “white female slave [is replaced] with a woeful black female slave, stripped to the waist, her lower half covered in a tatter-looking skirt, hair bound in scarf.” [5] The figure is also noticeably and unnecessarily sexually suggestive with her lips pursed and wide doe-like eyes fluttering away. Her wrists are chained together tightly in front of her, pushing her breasts together and up in order to tantalize the viewer, similarly to Giacomo Ginotti’s The Slave (figure 4). Portrayals such as these were the common understanding of the nude black feminine body and, according to Nelson:
“no matter how demurely posed or bolstered by Christian symbolism, [the black female nude] would not have implied the same level or morality, Christian resolve, or sexual chastity for nineteenth century bourgeois white audience and therefore could not have engendered a similar outpouring of poetic despair, sympathy, and outrage as that generated by Powers’s Greek Slave.” [6]
And it is this very lack of sympathy and outrage at the mutilation of the black female body that Edmonia Lewis undoubtedly combatted during her lifetime that inspired her depictions of women in her sculptures. Lewis frequently made strategic choices regarding the racial identity of the figures in her sculptures. Since the preferred medium for neoclassical sculpture was white marble, Lewis’s only option for depicting the different racial groups that her figures represented was to rely on commonly recognized (albeit stereotypical) phenotypic expressions: noses, lips, body-types, etc. In some of her other famous works such as Forever Free and Old Indian Arrowmaker and His Daughter, Lewis portrays her black and Native female figures with straight hair, slim noses, and slender frames. As Buick notes, “they look like Europeans… though depicted as white, they represent Lewis's desire to broaden the category of ‘woman’” in a way that both includes and excludes black women from certain conversations surrounding the ideals of femininity.[7] The same connection can be drawn for Lewis’s representation of the Egyptian royal in The Death of Cleopatra.
Cleopatra is globally renowned today for her fierceness, likened in a favorable image as a femme fatale. However, during the neoclassical era, she was mostly condemned for her hypersexuality and only favorable as a subject in sculpture and paintings because of her epic demise– this way she was able to serve as a not-so-subtle warning to those who ventured outside of the values of the “Cult of True Womanhood.” Lewis was well aware of this understanding of the queen, her reputation, and what a comparison to Cleopatra meant in the nineteenth century. She represented “a power-mad, sexually controlling woman [which] made her association with black women undesirable” to say the least.[8] As previously mentioned, Lewis had access to Egyptian coins created during the time of Cleopatra’s reign, portraying her similarly to a Roman/European physiognomy. Many scholars at the time “imagined Egypt as a racial and cultural bridge between the superior bodies of European and the inferior bodies of Africans'' in an effort to compare the social status of black Americans to that of royalty. However, Lewis wholly understood the repercussions of aligning such a “sexually deviant” and “morally compromised” individual to black women[9].
As is true with many other contemporary depictions of Cleopatra, Story’s queen is sympathetic to the white abolitionists’ cause – an effort to champion the end of slavery for one of a number of reasons ranging from the desire for racial equality to simply wanting to put an end to the South’s financial upper hand on the rest of the Union (the latter being more likely than the former). Nelson puts plainly that while Story’s “Nubian” depiction of the queen,
as a beautiful black woman in possession of intellectual ability was a stunning departure from the traditional parameters within which the black female subject could be represented…the sexualization of the black woman displaced [Cleopatra] from any easy alliance with bourgeois norms of proper womanhood, coded as white.[10]
Story’s naive, nugatory attempt at elevating the social status of the black woman had negative consequences only someone who lived as a black woman could have foreseen.
Until her death in 19ll, Edmonia Lewis navigated her life as a black woman carefully and with precision. She extended this meticulous nature to her own work. Lewis understood and appreciated the space that she had to carve out for herself (both literally and figuratively) as the only black and female artist working in the height of the neoclassical era. She had to decide early on to distance herself from her subject matters in order to be taken seriously as an artist, and in doing so, she was also able to blur the connection between her subjects and the women that look like her.[11] Lewis’s decision to race her subjects–specifically her sculpture of Cleopatra–as white or not black granted her the space and authority to protect and advocate for herself as an artist and a black woman.
[1] Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, Letters of Great Women: Extraordinary Correspondence from History's Remarkable Women, (Welbeck Publishing Group Limited, February 15, 2022), 102-108.
[2] Charmaine A. Nelson, The color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-century America, (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 13
[3] Nelson, The Color of Stone, 9
[4] Kirsten P. Buick, “The Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis: Invoking and Inverting Autobiography,” American Art, Vol. 9, no. 2 (Summer, 1995): 4-19.
[5] Nelson, The Color of Stone, 134
[6] Nelson, The Color of Stone, 136
[7] Kirsten P. Buick, “The Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis”, 4-19.
[8] Kirsten Pai Buick, “A Question Of ‘Likeness’: Edmonia Lewis's ‘The Death Of Cleopatra’,” Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 24, No. 4, SPECIAL ISSUE ON AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART (Summer 2005): 3-12.
[9] Nelson, The Color of Stone, 114.
[10] Nelson, the Color of Stone, 150
[11] Kirsten P. Buick, “The Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis”, 4-19.
