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Code-Switching and Semantic Narratives: Cleopatra’s Portraiture within the Hellenistic Visual Koine

Turcan, Alexandra
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Abstract
The thesis is an overview of contextual implications in Cleopatra’s portraiture created from 51 BC to 35 BC. The objective of this paper is to identify three different types of portraits based on the pictorial heritage in which they are grounded – Egyptian, Hellenistic, and Roman - and to demonstrate how the principle of code-switching applies to these images in the framework of a universal Mediterranean visual koine. It is an attempt to outline the stylistic and semantic approaches of Cleopatra’s portraits: from the earliest Egyptian representations inherited from pharaonic tradition, to the Hellenistic iconography with royal connotations legible across the Mediterranean world. It analyses connections between status and its appropriate iconographic markers within the multicultural medium in which Cleopatra’s images operated. In doing so this thesis seeks to establish the place of the portraits within a temporal and visual narrative. It discusses the ancestral Ptolemaic characteristics that dictated the iconography of the royal portraits and how they in turn influenced elite female imagery of the Hellenistic world. The scope thus is to establish the manner in which these portraits engaged efficiently with a vast audience of culturally diverse backgrounds, serving as linkage to legitimized royal discourses on diverse semantic levels simultaneously. A close study of Antonian-Cleopatrian coinage and Caesar-coded images of the queen in Rome provides evidence of the inevitable acculturation that impedes one from dividing royal images into singular national narratives. It proves that Cleopatra’s portraiture had undergone a process of connotational expansion, consciously and skillfully code-switching between strategies that were assessed by multiple strata of audience.
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Thesis (B.A. in Art History, Minor in Creative Writing)--John Cabot University, Spring 2021.
Date
2021
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Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, -30 B.C.
Citation
Turcan, Alexandra. "Code-Switching and Semantic Narratives: Cleopatra’s Portraiture within the Hellenistic Visual Koine." BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2021.
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