Wed 20 Oct
|East Horsley Village Hall
Cleopatra: No raving beauty but all powerful
A fascinating look at how artists have portrayed a powerful woman over 2,000 years.
Time & location
20 Oct 2027, 10:30 – 11:30
East Horsley Village Hall, Kingston Ave, East Horsley, Leatherhead KT24 6QT
About the event
About the Lecture
Cleopatra, the woman for whose love’s sake Antony is imagined to have given up the chance to rule the Roman world, has been inspiring painters, poets and (more recently) film-makers for over two millennia. Their gorgeously voluptuous depictions of her offer insights into changing concepts of beauty, and into the racial and sexual assumptions underlying them.
Showing images ranging from Roman portrait busts, through medieval illuminations, the glorious works of Renaissance masters like Michelangelo, the splendour of Tiepolo and the exoticism of Gustave Moreau to 20th century film stars (Theda Bara, Claudette Colbert, Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor and the Carry On team’s Amanda Barry), I will show how Cleopatra became a screen onto which artists have projected their wildly differing fantasies about exotic danger and erotic bliss.
About the Lecturer
Lucy Hughes-Hallett's most recent book on the 17th century Duke of Buckingham, The Scapegoat, has won the Plutarch Award for Biography of the Year and the Randy Shilts Award for Non-Fiction. Her previous biography, The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio was described in The Sunday Times as ‘the biography of the decade’. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Costa Biography Award. Her other non-fiction books include Cleopatra and Heroes.
She also writes fiction. Her novel, Peculiar Ground, is largely set in the 17th century, and narrated by a landscape designer loosely based on the diarist John Evelyn. It was described as 'almost Tolstoyan in its sly wit and descriptive brilliance' (The Guardian) and 'full of drama, vivid characters, wit, gorgeous writing and fascinating detail’. (New York Times).
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Historical Association, she is a widely respected critic. She was Chair of the Judges for the 2021 International Booker Prize.