Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Cleopatra.
The gallery
The Death of Meleager (La mort de Méléagre)
François Boucher, 1727
An early history painting by François Boucher, made during his years in Italy and now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes. The young Calydonian hero Meleager collapses at the left, his strength ebbing as his mother Althaea consumes the fated brand on which his life depends; his grieving household presses around the couch. Among the women gathered at the dying hero's side is his wife Cleopatra (Alcyone), daughter of Idas and Marpessa — the wife whom Homer makes pivotal to Meleager's story and who, Apollodorus tells, hanged herself in grief after his death. Boucher renders the moment in warm, fluid Baroque drama, with anxious attendants and a dog completing the deathbed group.
The Death of Meleagros
François Boucher, c. 1727
An oil sketch by François Boucher in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Ciechanowiecki Collection), closely related to his finished Death of Meleager. The composition stages the same Ovidian and Homeric deathbed: Meleager wastes away as the brand burns, encircled by his lamenting family. The cluster of mourning women at his side carries his wife Cleopatra, whose plea once roused Meleager to defend Calydon in the Iliad and whose own death by hanging follows his in Apollodorus. The looser, sketchier handling reveals Boucher's swift compositional thinking before the larger canvas.
The Death of Meleager
Bernardino Capitelli, c. 1633
A Sienese Baroque etching by Bernardino Capitelli, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The broad horizontal print depicts the climactic scene of Ovid's Metamorphoses: the dying Meleager surrounded by his stricken household as the magical log is consumed. The mourning company assembled around the hero belongs to the same tradition in which his wife Cleopatra (Alcyone) shares his final hour — the woman whose grief, in the ancient sources, ends in her own suicide. Capitelli's energetic line and crowded, theatrical staging are typical of seventeenth-century Tuscan printmaking.