The painting is from the collection of the Istituto Bancario Italiano, which bought it in 1967 together with the collection of the Banca Romana. It was restored in Rome by Anna Carusi in 1978. Published for the first time in 1995 as a work of the 17th-century Emilia school, it was examined in greater depth for the 1998 catalogue of the Cariplo Collection by Andrea Spiriti, who noted references to the art of Guido Reni and his various works on the same subject in the Royal Collection at Hampton Court, the Galleria Palatina in Florence, the Mahon Collection in London, the Pinacoteca Capitolina in Rome and the Institute of Art in Minneapolis). As none of these corresponds exactly to the image presented in the Cariplo Foundation painting, Spiriti suggested the existence of yet another version of Cleopatra’s suicide used by the author of our canvas as a model.

The quality of the work is confirmed by the imposition of cultural heritage restrictions (7 February 1994). The chiaroscuro contrast between the face now white with agony and the dark background, the careful rendering of the red brocade in which Cleopatra is dressed and the beautiful hands around which the asp is coiled clearly show that this is no mere copy. The author is instead an original interpreter of the art of Guido Reni, very close to him but sufficiently independent at the same time to put forward a personal reading of the master’s themes without necessarily referring to an existing prototype. It is no easy matter to identify the hand of this follower because Guido (as he was called by contemporaries with no need to specify the surname, just like Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Titian) had a host of pupils and imitators. The portrayal of a woman looking up in three-quarter profile was a recurrent motif in the Bolognese art of the time and numerous examples can be found. One of the most similar is in the Rape of Europa by Guido Cagnacci (formerly the property of Molinari Pradelli [1]), where the position of the head is almost identical and suggests the existence of a model by Reni, a drawing or cartoon used by his pupils. The diaphanous skin of Cleopatra, a key element of the painting, leads us to identify the author of the Cariplo Foundation canvas as Michele Desubleo, a French-Flemish painter who joined the Reni workshop around to 1636 when already an adult. Born in Mauberge in 1602, he was an established artist in his own right who chose to work at the court of one of the most acclaimed painters of the day in order to improve his skills. The elegance of the composition, the glossy skin of Flemish derivation and the attention to detail in the rendering of the garments are all elements lending support to this attribution. The work would thus have been painted by Desubleo during his stay in Bologna, and hence in the 15 years between 1635 and 1650, when he was presumably already in Venice. The Cleopatra presents similarities in particular with the Diana in the Municipal Collections of Bologna [2] and the extraordinary Berenice in a private collection (published in La Scuola di Guido Reni, eds. Massimo Pirondini and Emilio Negro, Banco S. Gemigniano and S. Prospero, Modena 1992, p. 224, ill. no. 208).