Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. The Banquet of Cleopatra

"The Banquet of Cleopatra" is one of two large canvases by the Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo that made the collection of Prince Nikolai Borisovich Yusupov famous. The subject goes back to the accounts of Pliny the Elder and Plutarch: at a feast in honour of Mark Antony, the Egyptian queen dissolves a precious pearl in wine and drinks it.

The paired compositions "The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra" and "The Banquet of Cleopatra" were painted in the 1740s, shortly before Tiepolo's famous frescoes on the same subjects in the Palazzo Labia in Venice. Yusupov bought them in 1800 in St Petersburg from Pietro Concolo, together with other works by Tiepolo that had been intended for sale to the Russian court. In the prince's palace on the Fontanka in St Petersburg, and later at Arkhangelskoye, the paintings were given a special Tiepolo Hall; in 1927–1928 the museum recreated it, bringing the master's canvases back from other museums.

On the left, Mark Antony in a red cloak sits at a round table, with a page holding a tray and a Moorish servant behind him. On the right sits Cleopatra, a pearl in her raised hand, with Artavasdes and two old men beside her. The staircase in the foreground is full of figures: a dark-skinned youth with a tray, a warrior with a spear, a dwarf clambering up the steps. Oil on canvas.