This survey was originally intended to verify Shakespeare’s theory of art by providing some concrete internal evidence as to the dramatist’s knowledge of the visual arts. That such a survey be undertaken was in part suggested by authors — such as Murray Roston (Renaissance Perspective in Literature and the visual Arts, 1987), John Greenwood (Shifting Perspectives and the Stylish Style, 1988) and Alistair Fowler (Renaissance Realism, 2003) — who hypothesized something of Shakespeare’s sensitivity to the Mannerist aesthetic. The survey was also influenced by Calderwood’s suggestion (1971, p.5) to include terms such as counterfeit and shadow.
The Mannerist aesthetic itself, according to Linda Murray (The Late Renaissance and Mannerism, 1967), “can be quite easily recognized and defined”.
“In general, [Mannerism] is equated with … subject matter either deliberately obscure, or treated so that it becomes difficult to understand — the main incident pushed into the background or swamped in irrelevant figures serving as excuses for displays of virtuosity in figure painting; with extremes of perspective, distorted proportions or scale — figures jammed into too small a space so that one has the impression that any movement would burst the confines of the picture; with vivid colour schemes, employing discordant contrasts, … not for descriptive or naturalistic purposes, but as a powerful adjunct to the emotional impact of a picture.” (pp.30–1)
That Shakespeare has on occasion been “deliberately obscure” and “difficult to understand” (Loves Labours Lost), or that some of his principal plots were “pushed in the background” (1 & 2 Henry IV, Much Adoe), or his plays “swamped in irrelevant figures serving as excuses for displays of virtuosity” (Hamlet), or that they presented “extremes of perspective” or “distorted proportions or scale” (Othello, Anthonie and Cleopatra), has indeed been the stuff of much Shakespearean scholarship. Thus there is little doubt that if Shakespeare himself wasn’t “in the know” (which is highly unlikely) then he certainly fell under the spell of the mannerist zeitgeist.
The pejorative connotation that was subsequently given to the term mannered is in part due to the notion that emphasis on skill and virtuosity betray an essential superficiality. But, as Murray herself points out, the key to such displays of virtuosity was not so much art (or skill) for art’s sake, but rather to serve “as a powerful adjunct to [an] emotional impact”.
If, in rhetorical terms, the mannerist artist emphasized inventio, dispositio and articulatio over historia, then it almost certainly was in order that his viewer/spectator appreciate not only what the work represented but also how it did so. Hence, the mannerist aesthetic, itself, may have been essentially emancipatory in that it favoured and emphasized what was shared between artists and their audiences alike: the actuality of art.
Thus, in attempting to establish this survey’s search-terms did we initially turn to Giorgio Vasari’s Vitae (1568) where the term maniera (or fine style) appears for the first time in its art-historical context. Vasari’s seminal work was almost certainly known to Shakespeare (in its original Italian) by the time he wrote The Winter’s Tale (ca. 1609–10) wherein a paragon of Mannerism, the painter and architect Julio Romano (1499–1546) is mentioned by name (5.2.98 TLN 3105).
But if Vasari’s “five qualities”, as defined in the Preface to Part III of the Lives of the Artists — good rule, order, proportion, design, & style (p.249) — seemed like a good contemporaneous place to start, most of these terms — in their artistic sense at least — only rarely apply to what Shakespeare wrote.
There is not a single occurrence of good rule(s) in Shakespeare (where rule is almost always to “rule over”). For him an order, is either a “command”, a “religious fraternity”, or a “state of affairs” (never something Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, or Tuscan); though there is, perhaps, an indication of Vasari’s meaning in what the character of Time in The Winters Tale says: “Let me passe / The same I am, ere ancient’st Order was / Or what is now receiu’d (4.1.9–11 TLN 1588–90).
A design in Shakespeare is a “plan” or a “purpose” and not Vasari’s “imitation of the most beautiful things in nature” on a “flat surface” (id.). Proportion most often refers to the relative “size” of something and only rarely to “parts properly arranged” (id.). But, here again, there may be two tantalizing exceptions to this last, the first in 1 Henry VI: “For what you see, is but the smallest part,/ And least proportion of Humanitie:/ I tell you Madame, were the whole Frame here (2.3.52–4 TLN 893–5), the second in Richard III: “I, that am curtail’d of this faire Proportion,/ Cheated of Feature by dissembling Nature,/ Deform’d, vn-finish’d (1.1.18–20 TLN 20–2).
As for style (or maniera) itself — which Vasari defines as “copying the most beautiful things in nature and combining the most perfect members … to produce the finest possible figure” (pp.249–50), well, Shakespeare’s mostly uses the word simply as a synonym for “manner” (i.e. “type”, “fashion” or “custom”).
And so, as was to be expected, determining Shakespeare’s “artistic” vocabulary ended-up being a somewhat more arduous task than determining his theatrical vocabulary. After all, theatre was his practice, whereas what he might have known of the visual arts and their critical discourses is a matter of conjecture.
But though Shakespeare does not appear to address the artistic cognoscendi in his audience (at least, not in their own terms) there very likely was some communication between artists (since royal or noble patrons were often the same for all of them). Furthermore, at a time when treatises on painting by painters and critics — such as Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Pittura (1435–6), Francisco da Hollanda’s Trattato De Pintura Antiqua, (1558), Ludovico Dolce’s Dialoguo della pittura (1557), Benedetto Varchi’s Due Lezzioni (1550), and Giovanni Lomazzo Trattato dell’arte (1585 / english translation 1598) — were available, why would an omnivorous reader like Shakespeare (for such a reader Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources ably demonstrated him to be) — a mimetic artist himself — not have been interested in the works and writings of other artists?
Art historian Anthony Blunt wrote in his brief article An Echo of the “Paragone” in Shakespeare (1939) that the art criticism of Tymon of Athens’ first poet & painter scene was rather common-place. Shakespeare, says Blunt, “hardly says more than that works of art are either very like nature or more beautiful than nature” (p.261). But this criticism, as such, isn’t unlike that of Vasari in his Preface to Part III of the Lives. (For a further discussion of Blunt’s views and Timon’s two poet & painter scenes, see Appendice B, Timon and the Paragone Revisited).
Yet in Sonnet XXIV Shakespeare writes that “perspective” is “best Painter’s art”. And, as Greenwood points out (1988, p.5–8), Shakespeare describes an anamorphosis in Richard II: “Like perspectiues, which rightly gaz’d upon/ Shew nothing but confusion, ey’d awry, Distinguish form (2.2.18–20 TLN 970–2); and he is perhaps (according to Rolland Frye according to Greenwood) the first english author to have written a passage describing the perspectival effect of foreshortening in Egdar’s speech to Gloster at the Cliffs of Dover (King Lear 4.6.11–24 TLN 2446–59). So there indeed appears to be some tantalizing signs (as well as some scholarly intersubjective agreement) regarding Shakespeare’s knowledge of the visual arts.
Of course, in Shakespeare’s time, the word art, itself, is deceiving since it mostly referred to learning or skill. Art was something acquired a posteriori as opposed to given naturally a priori. Hence art (in Shakespeare as well as by tradition) is often opposed to nature and perceived as something either false or deceitful that counterfeits natural reality.
Another word, painting, is almost as problematic in that — in Shakespeare’s writings, at least — it mostly refers to the application of pigment or colour (more often than not as make-up). And yet two of the first English occurrences of the word referring to a “painted image” (or picture) are found in his dramatic works: in Loves Labours Lost’ “like a man after the old painting” (3.1.16–7 TLN 789) and Tymon of Athens’ “A peece of Painting” (1.1.155 TLN 193). Even as Shakespeare was writing, then, the meaning of art (and of painting) was probably changing.
Certainly, from Vasari onwards, what we now call “art appreciation” went (economically as well as aesthetically) from an appreciation of what was being represented to an appreciation of the artist himself, of his own “conduite” or manner (Robert Klein, La Forme et l’intelligible, 1970, pp.382–93). Indeed, the skilful display of technique was — as the term art itself indicated — always a subject for appreciation. It is therefore likely that it was the late renaissance Mannerists’ overt displays of technique that ultimately made for the term art itself to be almost exclusively applied to the mimetic arts. (and, thereafter, to art for art’s sake).
And so, even though Shakespeare’s use of the words art and painting doesn’t always refer to what we now understand them to mean, both words are nonetheless included in our survey, along with the somewhat more appropriate terms picture, perspective and image. Thus the search-terms for this play-by-play concordance of Art, Imitation, and Painting in the First Folio are the following.
•ART/ARTIST
•COUNTERFEIT
•IMAGE/IMAGINATION
•IMITATION
•LIMN
•PAINT/PAINTER/PAINTING
•PERSPECTIVE
•PICTURE
•SHADOW
•WATER-WORK
Apart from perspective, limn, and water-work, these terms are not so evidently technical (and therefore un-ambiguous) as the previous chapters’ theatrical terms. After all, ever since Horace’s ut pictura poesis, one can paint with words, and a picture or image can be poetical (though the underlying emphasis remains on the sense of sight). The same is true for what imagination generates. But if a shadow can be that which is “cast by an object in light” as well as a “ghost”, these are two meanings we may easily exclude from our survey in favour of those shadows that are “insubstantial copies or imitations”. And though we certainly cannot reduce these terms’ ambiguity to nought, nevertheless — in what follows — do they almost always refer to either a description or an imitation, never to the thing itself.
All of the following entries are listed according to the order in which they appear in the First Folio. They retain the Folio’s lineation, spelling & punctuation. Speech prefixes are also included as well as the Norton Facsimile’s TLN (2nd ed. 1996) and the act, scene, & verse numbers of the Riverside Shakespeare (2nd ed. 1997). Bullets (•) indicate when an entry (albeit sometimes by analogy) concerns the art of painting.
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