How long was her nose, how dark was her skin? Representations of Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator, the last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt, tell us more about the times such representations were made than the actual historical person herself. Dead for more than two thousand years, “Cleopatra” has been a mirror upon which people can project ourselves. The sexually kinetic Cleopatra in the HBO series Rome (2005–2007), played by an English actor, was undoubtedly a lot more early 2000s than 30 BCE. Now, in the mid-2020s, one of the writers of the upcoming Denis Villeneuve-directed film Cleopatra describes it as a “lean, mean political thriller.”

Was Cleopatra Greek, Egyptian, African? Was she white, Black? Was she “all of the above”?

For the Romans, who added Egypt to the empire after Cleopatra’s suicide, the queen was the exotic seducer of both Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony. Her femininity and sexuality were contrasted with Octavian’s masculinity and rationality. Yet, by refusing to accept Roman dominance, Cleopatra would end up begrudgingly honored by the Romans. She died unbowed, like a model Roman should.

More than eighteen hundred years later, Cleopatra had become proof that Africa had a worthy history. So argued abolitionists, for whom Cleopatra was a Black Egyptian or a Nubian, the epitome of an ancient civilization older than Greece or Rome. Sculptor William Wetmore Story, a white American ex pat in Rome, was in this camp. His African-featured Cleopatra was exhibited to much comment and acclaim at the 1862 World Exposition in London.

Scholars Margaret Malamud and Martha Malamud write that “twentieth-first century viewers may struggle to see Story’s Cleopatra as Black,” but that was definitely how whites saw the statue in 1862. Many were surprised: they’d never seen Cleopatra looking other than, well, European. Story’s racial take only went so far, however; his “Cleopatra is a noble savage, her Egyptian and African background and sexuality linked with strength and rebellion against servitude,” write Malamud and Malamud.

Edmonia Lewis, who also worked in Rome, is considered the first sculptor of African and Native American descent. She specialized in portraying abolitionists and her “Roman studio was a stop for many on the Grand Tour.” Ulysses S. Grant sat for her, and she made busts of John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Her take on the last Egyptian queen, The Death of Cleopatra, was exhibited in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. It too got a lot of notice: her Cleopatra had a distinctly white/European/Greek look.

Lewis, the “Negress” member of the Roman “marmoreal flock” about which Henry James griped, chose to represent Cleopatra along the lines of the likenesses on ancient Roman coins and medallions. Her Cleopatra was “neither African nor beautiful.”

Unable to afford assistants, who did most of the preliminary carving for wealthier sculptors, Lewis worked on the Carrara marble for four years. The resulting 3,000-pound sculpture “shocked and fascinated critics and spectators.”

Lewis was the only Black artist in the Centennial Exhibition. In making Cleopatra white, Lewis was well aware of the market, then dominated by Neo-classicism—the classic sources portrayed Cleopatra with an aquiline nose and jutting chin.

But Lewis also knew that racism dominated perceptions of Black female sexuality. (In 1862, she had been beaten, “probably raped,” Malamud and Malamud write, and left for dead by a racist mob in Oberlin, Ohio.) She didn’t want the notoriously seductive Cleopatra to be associated with Africa, Africans, or those of African descent. The abolitionist view of Cleopatra as symbolic of ancient African civilization wasn’t enough to overcome the danger of portraying an infamous sexual predator as Black.

Scholar Kirsten Pai Buick seconds this argument, writing that Lewis “felt compelled to separate Egypt from Cleopatra and Cleopatra from the African-American woman. Cleopatra’s life story as a power-mad, sexually controlling woman made her association with [B]lack women undesirable.”

“The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor,” said Lewis of her departure from America in 1865, making her an early example of generations of Black American artists who sought refuge in Europe. As a fiercely independent “colored sculptor,” she worked hard to carve her own way through racial stereotypes.

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