Un busto di regina tolemaica al Museo di Torino. Note sull'iconografia di Berenice II e di Cleopatra I

The bust of a Ptolemaic queen in the Egyptian Museum Turin (inv. 1385), shows three special features: i) the shoulders are asymmetric; ii) the face is a syntbesis of Greek and Egyptian manners and shows personal features; iii) she wears three uraeus. The asymmetric shoulders prove that this queen brought a cornucopia as other statues (the queens of Hermitage, Luzern, New York and Cairo and statues of Isi-Tyche). Some of these statues (that of Hermitage and the Cleopatra of the Metropolitan Museum af Art) wear three uraeus. The queen of San José has three uraeus but doesn't bring the cornucopia. Both the statues of the Hermitage and san José show some features like the queen of Turin. An hellenistic portrait of Berenice II in the Museun of Kassel is similar in the shape of the face to the queen of Turin. If the queen of Turin is Berenice II, we can suppose that the third uraeus represents her queenship on the Cyrenaica as daughter of Magas Cyrene's king. The Cleopatra of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is probably Cleopatra I for the characteristics of her face. Perhaps this queen wears three urseus because she was the daughter of Antiocus the Great, the king of Syria, and according to the Ptolemaic propaganda, the king of Egypt acquired again the Celesyria thanks to the marriage of Ptolemy V with Cleopatra I. The bust of Turin is a good example of Greek-Egyptian art: the Egyptian religion and the Ptolemaic propaganda were two important spheres often connected and they could communicate to the Egyptian and Greek people in a well-established «figurative bilingualisrn».