Sphinx

The past is political is personal is political. It offers a wide range of resources for different political purposes: slogans, battle-cries, values and ideals, costumes, exemplary figures and actions, a stand-point from which the present can be viewed and held to account. Of course all such analogies and appropriations drastically simplify the complexity of the actual past, and even of later understanding of it – that’s how they’re able to operate, by emphasising resemblances and erasing differences. But this process is never wholly under the control of the one making a connection between past and present; the awkward bits of the past that get smoothed over or whitewashed for the purposes of making the comparison plausible have an awkward habit of re-emerging regardless…

In 1755, the Markgraf and Markgrafin of Bayreuth commissioned a painting from the Italian artist Pompeo Batoni; not a portrait (like the ones he had recently completed of their daughter and problematic son-in-law) but a historical scene. Cleopatra Before Augustus, as the painting (now in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Paris) is known, or Cleopatra Showing Augustus the Bust of Julius Caesar as in the etching I saw in Bayreuth last week, features the Markgrafin Wilhelmine as a rosy-cheeked, Northern European Cleopatra and, less distinctively, the Markgraf as the new Roman emperor – and if you wondered why the bust of Caesar doesn’t look too much like the more familiar portraits, that’s because it does bear a notable resemblance to Wilhelmine’s brother, Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Leaving aside issues of historical veracity – ancient accounts of the meeting between Octavian and Cleopatra after the death of Antony (e.g. Plutarch, Life of Antony 80ff) make no mention of them discussing Caesar, and also suggest a Queen in a considerably worse state of repair – it’s clear that there’s a Message here, from Wilhelmine (who took charge of all such cultural activities and threw herself into them wholeheartedly, as is clear from her exotically-decorated apartments in the Neues Schloss in Bayreuth) to her husband and/or to the world.

The standard interpretation is a narrowly political one, related to the immediate context of events. Despite being married to Frederick’s sister, the Markgraf Friedrich III had done quite well for himself through a policy of careful neutrality in the constant wars between Prussia and Austria, so here, it is argued, Wilhelmine is urging him to come off the fence, just in time for the outbreak of the Seven Years War. This strikes me as absurdly particular, and scarcely linked to the ancient events (Cleopatra can hardly be urging Augustus to ally with Caesar…). Better, surely, to see this as advocacy of a style of rule: Octavian learnt to imitate Ceasar (echoing, Penny Goodman tells me, the conventional C18 discourse that saw Caesar as a good ruler and Octavian as a bad one; look out for her edited collection from CUP on Afterlives of Augustus!) and so Friedrich of Bayreuth should look to the brilliant polymath and general Friedrich of Prussia for a model.

Of course, if it was just about ‘Augustus’ learning to be a Caesar, one could easily have chosen one of the occasions on which they actually met; this episode places ‘Cleopatra’ front and centre as the indispensable intermediary, interpreter, even teacher, the one who understands Caesar and understands what should be learnt from his example. This was exactly the role Wilhelmine had taken in real life, making the most of her exile from the Prussian court into the depths of the provinces by creating her own little centre of Enlightenment with her husband’s wealth, with music, art, philosophy, architecture and landscape gardening, and urging him to be similarly active. Indeed, perhaps we should see the picture as being about the past in two ways, not just evoking Roman models but also looking back on how Wilhelmine had shaped her husband’s rule by drawing on her brother’s example, rather than suggesting that it was still in need of improvement.

Still, by drawing attention to the triangular relationship in this way, Wilhelmine’s instructions to the artist inevitably…drew attention to the triangular relationship. Brother becomes dead lover; husband becomes cruel conqueror; woman can escape degradation only through death. You have to wonder what Markgraf Friedrich made of it; even for a pre-Freudian era, this seems distinctly odd. How much, if any, of the personal and sexual overtones were recognised or deliberate? Did Wilhelmine intend a straightforward political-moral message, that’s then potentially undermined by all the other associations of the Cleopatra story? Or was she actually seeking to make a multi-layered statement that could always be disavowed by insisting on the simple exemplary element?

At the least, Wilhelmine was fully aware of the complexity of Cleopatra’s story, and identified with it; in 1842 she had painted a portrait of herself as the Egyptian queen at the moment of suicide, clasping the snake to her bared breasts – a picture that was certainly intended for her private quarters only, but a daring and rather disturbing thing nevertheless. Her other great heroine, Semiramis – subject of the opera she wrote for her new opera house in Bayreuth, and of another picture she commissioned in the mid 1750s – was similarly ambiguous: the image of the good ruler putting the interests of the state first, but also originally a plaything and prize in the violent world of politics, whose beauty led to the death of her first husband.

I think the adjective I’d most readily apply to this picture is “playful”, and not just because I imagine an ironic glint in Cleopatra’s eyes while Augustus is taking the whole thing completely seriously (which would also echo the dynamics of their conversation in Plutarch’s account). It – she – is aware of the distance between past and present, of the mixture of acting and seriousness involved in putting on such costumes, and of the possibility of a single picture conveying multiple messages. It perhaps even anticipates Reinhard Koselleck’s observation on the decline of historia magistrate vitae in the early 19th century, that those who recognise the gap between experience and expectation can employ classical references to manipulate those who take them wholly at face value.

And the fact that it’s playful and ironic doesn’t mean that it isn’t serious. Wilhelmine depicts herself, or has herself depicted, as powerful women who develop dubious reputations because of their wielding of power – because what’s the alternative? Better Cleopatra or Semiramis, with all that follows, that nobody.