You’ll mar it if you kiss it; stain your own

With oily painting. Shall I draw the curtain?

Leon. No, not these twenty years.

Perdita.So long could I

Stand by, a looker on.”

This exquisite piece of statuary is ascribed by Shakespeare (Winter’s Tale, act v. sc. 2, l. 8, vol. iii. p. 420) to “that rare Italian master Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity, and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape: he so near to Hermione hath done Hermione, that they say one would speak to her, and stand in hope of answer.”

According to Kugler’s “Geschichte der Malerei,”—History of Painting (Berlin, 1847, vol. i. p. 641),—Julio Romano was one of the most renowned of Raphael’s scholars, born about 1492, and dying in 1546. “Giulio war ein Künstler von rüstigem, lebendig, bewegtem, keckem Geiste, begabt mit einer Leichtigkeit der Hand, welche den kühnen und rastlosen Bildern seiner Phantasie überall Leben und Dasein zu geben wusste.”[[68]]

His earlier works are to be found at Rome, Genoa, and Dresden. Soon after Raphael’s death he was employed in Mantua both as an architect and a painter; and here exist some of his choice productions, as the Hunting by Diana, the frescoes of the Trojan War, the histories of Psyche, and other Love-tales of the gods. Pictures by him are scattered over Europe,—some at Venice, some in the sacristy of St. Peter’s, and in other places in Rome; some in the Louvre, and some in the different collections of England,[[69]] as the Jupiter among the Nymphs and Corybantes.

Whether any of his works were in England during the reign of Elizabeth, we cannot affirm positively; but as there were “sixteen by Julio Romano” in the fine collection of paintings at Whitehall, made, or, rather, increased by Charles I., of which Henry VIII. had formed the nucleus, it is very probable there were in England some by that master so early as the writing of the Winter’s Tale, or even before, in which, as we have seen, he is expressly named. It may therefore be reasonably conjectured that in the statue of Hermione Shakespeare has accurately described some figure which he had seen in one of Julio Romano’s paintings.

The same rare appreciation of the beautiful appears in the Cymbeline, act ii. sc. 4, lines 68–74, 81–85, 87–91, vol. ix. pp. 207, 208, where the poet describes the adornments of Imogen’s chamber:—