Neither has Hawthorne valued its expression too highly--the
expression of worldly splendor incarnated in a beautiful woman on the
tragical verge of an abyss. If she only were beautiful! Here the
limitations of the statue commence. Hawthorne says: "The sculptor had not
shunned to give the full, Nubian lips, and other characteristics of the
Egyptian physiognomy." Here he follows the sculptor himself, and it is
remarkable that a college graduate like William Story should have made so
transparent a mistake. Cleopatra was not an Egyptian at all. The
Ptolemies were Greeks, and it is simply impossible to believe that they
would have allied themselves with a subject and alien race. This kind of
small pedantry has often led artists astray, and was peculiarly virulent
during the middle of the last century. The whole figure of Story's
"Cleopatra" suffers from it. He says again: "She was draped from head to
foot in a costume minutely and scrupulously studied from that of ancient
Egypt." In fact, the body and limbs of the statue are so closely shrouded
as to deprive the work of that sense of freedom of action and royal
abandon which greets us in Shakespeare's and Plutarch's "Cleopatra."
Story might have taken a lesson from Titian's matchless "Cleopatra"
in the Cassel Gallery, or from Marc Antonio's small woodcut of
Raphael's "Cleopatra.
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