ABSTRACT

Enobarbus’s famous evocation of Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra figures the Egyptian Queen as greater than a work of art; yet in Enobarbus’s imagination she is grasped best through comparison with art. This trope is striking, but not surprising given the classical tradition of ut pictura poesis (as is painting, so is poetry) and Shakespeare’s conception of Cleopatra as a famed masterpiece, self-invented as well as mythologized by others. The conceit of Cleopatra “o’erpicturing Venus,” however, has a competitive ring to it, expressing not so much the celebrated contest between poetry and painting as a strategic contest between theater and painting. Enobarbus’s erotic vision of Cleopatra on the Cydnus river is set in competition with Apelles’s legendary picture of Venus’s birth, the Venus Anadyomene (Rising from the Sea).2 Furthermore, in re-creating Cleopatra for the English stage, Shakespeare has positioned himself as a competitor not only with classical and Renaissance writers but also with the great painter Apelles, who was said by Pliny to have “surmounted” all painters and whose distinct genius lay in capturing venustas, the Latin root for Venus, signifying sexual charm and visible grace (1964, 279-80).