Re-cognizing Leontes

Summary

Hamlet. My father – methinks I see my father.

Horatio. O where, my lord?

Hamlet. In my mind's eye, Horatio.

As the denouement of The Winter's Tale begins to unfold, we learn that, many years before, Paulina commissioned a statue of Hermione, the presumably long-dead queen of Sicilia, that with its presence will help to reconstitute the royal family. It is, the Third Gentleman reveals to the court and to us,

a piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Giulio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape. He so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer (5.2.93–100).

Nowhere else in this play, which so closely follows the romance of Pandosto by Robert Greene that it may well be a tribute to him, does fiction reach out to incorporate an authentic historic person. Why does Shakespeare make such a temporal and generic interruption and why, given this stretch, does he choose a deceased Italian artist who was far better known, in Florence and in Mantua, as a painter, architect, engineer and interior decorator than as a sculptor?

It is quite possible, of course, that Shakespeare and several members of his audience might well have known of Romano's considerable stature in his own country. He was born in Rome around 1492 and at an early age distinguished himself as a leading assistant to Raphael, filling the painter’s designs and cartoons; at the death of the famous painter, Romano, at the age of twenty-eight, was chosen to complete his master’s work then in progress – a vast fresco of the ‘Hall of Constantine’ in the Vatican consisting, along with minor matters, of four large subjects: the ‘Battle of Constantine’, the ‘Apparition of the Cross’, the ‘Baptism of Constantine’ and the ‘Donation of Rome to the Pope’.