Dressing Up During 1600s Europe

Cosplay is not new: dressing up in character has a long legacy, and has been considered appropriate in different occasions. Whereas in current American culture, you go to special conferences or wait for Halloween, in seventeenth-century Europe you would try to hire a fancy portrait artist and make a subtle statement about your personality and social position. Sometime in the 1660s, French aristocratic women began to cotton to the image of Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh of Egypt. This ought to strike us as odd, since in the centuries before, Cleopatra was considered a wiley vixen who had used her feminine sexuality to ensnare otherwise virtuous men to bring them great trouble. However, as Lynn Mollenauer examines, in the 17th century the wealthiest women in Europe began to imagine Cleopatra in different terms: still beautiful and sensuous, she was a loyal wife (to Marc Antony) who recognized the superficiality of riches. Thus, in this post you will see four portraits of actual ladies posing as Cleopatra – in each, the Egyptian queen holds a pearl. Viewers would have recognized a historical reference to an Ancient Roman legend in which Cleopatra boasted to her Roman lover Marc Antony that she would eat a costlier dinner than he. After the boast, she placed an invaluable pearl into a vinegary mixture that dissolved it, and drank it down. It takes quite an imagination to turn such a tale of conspicuous consumption into a morality anecdote about rejecting riches – but in this case, the women could have their pearls and eat them too, so to speak . . .