Existing comment:
Giovanni Battista Pittoni
The Banquet of Antony and Cleopatra, ca 1720s
The Roman historian Pliny the Elder told the story of the competition between Antony and Cleopatra to see who could give the most expensive feast. Cleopatra won when she dissolved one of her fabulous pearl earrings in wine and drank it down. The man in the background, Lucius Plancus, called Enobarbus (red-bearded), was the umpire of the wager; he stopped Cleopatra from dissolving the second pearl earring. Pliny considered this story an example of wasteful decadence, but 18th-century artists and their patrons ignored the moral implications and instead enjoyed such subjects as examples of fabulous opulence and ex... |