My resent research suggests that early modern dramatists regarded painting as a rival art, an art that shares a fundamental element with theater—its visual nature. Conflicting attitudes toward images and image makers in early modern England produced some highly ambivalent representations of painters and paintings in the theater. Shakespeare’s ambivalence created its most negative portrayal of painting in Timon of Athens, but it was only about five years later that Shakespeare presented the painted work of art in a more complicated, positive light.
In the Winter’s Tale, Paulina unveils a painted statue in a scene that rivals a religious ceremony; yet as a “miracle” of art rather than religion, the theatrical image and what it represents can be understood as natural. In one character’s words, “This is an art / Which does mend Nature—change it rather; but / The art itself is Nature” (4.4.95-97). Art is nature in the most literal sense, for the statue of Hermione is in fact not a statue, but rather the living Queen herself. Her devoted friend, Paulina, seeks to “mend Nature” by bringing the statue to life. Paulina’s art does, however, have a dark element to it, as is theatrically obvious by its very deceptiveness, but Paulina’s art is a response to Leonte’s even darker art, for she betrays and undermines the destructive power of Leonte’s jealous, Medusa-like gaze. The very unnaturalness of Leontes’ gaze is figured metaphorically in the petrified image of his wife. By literalizing and reversing the metaphor through the theatrical art, Paulina does indeed “mend” the worst of human nature. Through her stone she offers one more lasting rebuke of Leontes, softening his heart as his “evils [are] conjur’d to remembrance” (5.3.37, 40).
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