Copy after Michelangelo's drawing of Cleopatra

Author: Surya Stemerding

This drawing is of the famous Egyptian queen Cleopatra, who died by suicide in 30 BC; she allowed herself to be bitten by an adder after she had been rejected by Octavian, the ruler who went on to become Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor. The work is a copy after an autograph drawing by Michelangelo (1574-1564) that is now in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence.^[1]

The original drawing was one of the first that Michelangelo gave to his young friend Tommaso de’ Cavalieri (c.1512/1519-1587) in the early 1530s. It is one of three contemporaneous copies that bear witness to the great fame that Michelangelo’s drawing enjoyed in his own lifetime. In London there is an anonymous black chalk drawing after another copy in Paris.^[2] The latter is of very fine quality and is attributed to Giulio Clovio. The third copy is the one in Rotterdam, which has also been given to Giulio Clovio, originally on the basis of similarities to the one in the Louvre. However, it is stronger than that one, above all through the more convincing rendering of Cleopatra’s proportions and the subtle contours. It is for that reason that it was rightly described as an autograph work by Clovio in the exhibition catalogue of 2015. Nevertheless, the attribution of both sheets to a single hand is implausible.^[3]

De’ Cavalieri (c.1512/1519-1587) wrote to Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-1574) in 1562 to say that it grieved him to present him with Michelangelo’s drawing. That is also stated in a letter of the same year from Averardo Serristori (1497-1569) to his patron Cosimo, in which he also mentioned that prior to handing it over De’ Cavalieri had a copy made by a ‘maestro amico sculptor’ (an artist friend of his).^[4] That unnamed friend could well have been Giulio Clovio, since both belonged to the same circle in Rome.^[5] Wilde (1953) and Joannides (2003) regarded the Paris drawing as the copy ordered by De’ Cavalieri. Recently, though, the Rotterdam version has been identified as De’ Cavalieri’s copy because of its superior quality, and is thus probably by Clovio.^[6]