4879. Walter Savage Landor to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 87–89.
[Florence]
[21] [April 1861] [1]
My dear Browning, I receive at this moment your most satisfactory letter, kind and judicious as usual. Gladly will I comply with what it contains. My only anxiety was to bear as lightly as possible on my brother. I fear the landlord will not alter the stove or chimney.
I have lately been reading Hawthornes wonderful Romance Monte Beni. [2] It is redundant of poetry, and speck’d with nealogies, but often eloquent. In describing works of art, especially of sculpture, it appears more strange than original.
I remarked especially his remarks on the Cleopatra of Guido. [3] He praises the character given to her by a sculptor, than which nothing can be more at variance with fact. She had no ferocity, no maliciousness. Then she is represented as having thick Nubian lips. Now she had not a drop of Nubian or Egyptian blood in her veins. [4] So purely was she Grecian, so royally a Ptolemy, that the family kept itself within its own circle of relationship, within its own family. The Macedonians and Argives were fair—Menelaus is called ξανθος [5] by Homer. Guido and his followers have painted Cleopatra as a huge, fat woman. Historians mention her as having been carried in a sack to Julius Cæsar. In fact, she must have [been] thin and short, else it could not easily be done. The story may be true or it may be false, yet the narrator went on a received opinion– If she had anything of the Negro in her, Cæsar and Antony would never have been so captivated by her as they were, when each of them had all the beauties of the world at his command. It is quite as absurd to represent Cleopatra with Nubian or Egyptian lips as it would be if the sculptor had given them to Alexander. There is another strange proof of ignorance in Guido, on which, however, he is countenanced by the ancients. He has fixt two little black serpents on the bosom of poor Cleopatra, believing, as the Romans did, that she died by the bite of asps, brought to her in a basket of figs, .. little black serpents– Now Asps, when of growth to be dangerous, are neither black nor little, like our adders, but gray and somewhat large and thick. Is there any probability in this story, trumpt up at Rome? Would not a delicate woman shrink from the sight of an asp? Were there no poisons in Egypt? Among the priests and chemists were there none who could compose a deadly draught? The probability is much greater that the cruel cold-blooded wretch [6] who ordered the death of her boy Cæsarion ordered the mothers also. Remember the number of Equestrian families he ordered to be murdered in Perugia. [7] There he was the fore-runner of Pio Nono and Schmidt the Swiss. [8] He also, like the first of these, was worthy to be Pontifex Maximus. [9]
This is a long rigmarole– But, you have pardoned worse from me. It has been a pleasure to hear from Miss Field that Mrs Browning has benefitted so greatly by her stay in Rome. The thought of your return to Florence has been very consoling to me—ever truly and affectionately yours WL.
Address: Robert Browning Esq / 126 Via Felice / Roma.
Publication: BBIS-5, pp. 42–43.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Month and year provided by postmark; day derived from the Florence and Siena postmarks.
2. i.e., The Marble Faun: or, the Romance of Monte Beni (Boston, 1860).
3. Guido Reni (1575–1642) painted several versions of Cleopatra, all of which depict a woman of pale skin, ample proportions, and a small black or gray snake at her breast. Landor may have seen the one in the Pitti Palace, Florence. We have been unable to trace the version with “two little black serpents” that Landor mentions below.
4. In The Marble Faun, a statue of Cleopatra is described as follows: “Such was the creature’s latent energy and fierceness, she might spring upon you like a tigress, and stop the very breath that you were now drawing midway in your throat. The face was a miraculous success. The sculptor had not shunned to give the full, Nubian lips, and other characteristics of the Egyptian physiognomy” (I, 161). As Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his preface, the description of the novel’s “Cleopatra” was taken from William Wetmore Story’s sculpture (see letter 4616, note 6).
5. “Tawny-haired,” (The Iliad, IV, 210, trans. A.T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt).
6. Gaius Octavius, later Emperor Augustus (63 B.C.–14 A.D.). Landor referred to him as a “coldblooded hypocrite” in letter 4550.
7. In 41 B.C. Octavius put down a revolt led by Lucius Antonius (brother of Mark Antony), following a siege at Perugia (then Perusia) and the surrender of rebel forces. An account of subsequent events is given in Suetonius: “After the capture of Perusia he [Octavius] took vengeance on many, meeting all attempts to beg for pardon or to make excuses with the one reply, ‘You must die.’ Some write that three hundred men of both orders were selected from the prisoners of war and sacrificed on the Ides of March like so many victims at the altar raised to the Deified Julius” (The Lives of the Caesars, II, 15, 1, trans. J.C. Rolfe).
8. Antonio Schmidt d’Altorf, colonel in command of the Swiss troops that attacked Perugia in June 1859 (see letter 4435, note 2).
9. The head priest of the College of Pontiffs, an “advisory body” in ancient Rome that “presided over the State cult generally” (The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1957, p. 716).
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