"Shakespeare's Cleopatra may have been darkened by 'Phoebus's amorous
pinches', but in Tiepolo's magnificent frescoes in the Palazzo Labia in
Venice she is as pearly-pale as the earring she is about to drop into
her gilded cup, with albino eyelashes and opalescent breasts. It wasn't
until the very end of the 18th century, the period when Napoleon sent
his troops and his scholars to Egypt, that Cleopatra's exoticism became
once more (as it had been in her lifetime) the most important thing
about her. Delacroix painted her as a kind of Gypsy fortune-teller,
dark-eyed and tousle-haired." ("The Most Wicked Woman In History," The Guardian)
Image: Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra
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