"Rosso nell’aria di Roma": on some additional sources to Rosso Fiorentino’s Death of Cleopatra

The Death of Cleopatra by Rosso Fiorentino (1525-1527, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum) is the only secular work painted by Rosso before he moved to France. The current study proposes a new reading of the painting, which was recently restored for the exhibition dedicated to Rosso Fiorentino and Pontormo (Palazzo Strozzi, March-July 2014). The new reading of the work proposed in this paper is based both on new details that emerged after the cleaning, and on additional antique sources that might have influenced Rosso’s treatment of the subject. Until now, the work has been interpreted first and foremost as a result of the encounter between Rosso and the antique marbles he had seen in Rome. In painting Cleopatra, he turned to the celebrated marble of the Sleeping Ariadne in the Vatican (considered at the time as representing the suicide of the Egyptian queen) as his main source of inspiration. The present study seeks to broaden the perspective and look not only at the antique marble and the verses written in its honor (by Castiglione and Fausto Romano) but also at other Classical sources that Rosso might have used: Plutarch and Pliny the Elder, as has been previously suggested, as well as a series of Greek and Latin texts such as those by Galen, Nicander of Colophon or Claudius Aelianus. An attentive reading of the work in conjunction with these texts will conduce to a better understanding of the dialogue with the Classical tradition that Rosso undertook upon arriving in Rome. His Cleopatra stands as a paradigm to his prolific and powerful encounter with Antiquity, disregarded by Vasari. This encounter would continue until Rosso’s premature death in France more than a decade later.