“Wear this jewel for me, ʼtis my picture": The miniature in Shakespeare’s work

Both a political instrument and a crucial element within the sophisticated “language” of the Renaissance court, the Elizabethan “picture in little”, when considered in the light of Horace’s “ut picture poesis”, also presented certain characteristics which made it the perfect pictorial counterpart of the Petrarchan sonnet. In fact, following the Italian tradition inaugurated by Petrarch, English poets loved to acknowledge the affinity between the art of drawing miniatures and that of writing sonnets, and used the reference to the visual image to articulate a series of Petrarchan topoi and to meditate on their own mimetic power. Writing in the period in which the miniature craze peaked, Shakespeare, by considering the little portrait from a variety of different standpoints, demonstrates a special awareness of its multifaceted role in Elizabethan culture. While in Hamlet the reference to the king’s “picture in little” exemplifies the political function of the royal miniature, in A Lover’s Complaint the poet, maybe referring to a specific aristocrat’s miniatures, subtly highlights the psychological dynamic behind the use of miniatures in the courtly “love-game”. However, the element that Shakespeare appears to be most interested in is the relationship between verbal and visual portraits. In The Merchant of Venice, the eulogistic language through which Bassanio ekphrastically praises Portia’s miniature clearly links the Petrarchan sonnet and the miniature as two forms of art answering to the same aesthetic principles. This idealizing aesthetics at the base of this paragone is more clearly called into question in the works focused on the discussion of the Petrachan model. While in Twelfth Night the reference to Olivia’s miniature reveals the deep ambiguity inherent in both the nature and aims of such a depiction of the lady, in Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare links the explicit rejection of the Petrarchan representation of the beloved to a specific kind of visual portrayal, epitomizing the nexus between sonnets, jewels and miniatures in the highly symbolic image of the “lady walled about with diamonds”. Besides the interesting references to the actual uses of the miniature in the Renaissance, Shakespeare’s reflection on the picture in little appears then to be essentially a means to reflect on the power and limits of different artistic media and aesthetic models. By calling into question the idealizing principles at the base of that sort of courtly “fairy-tale world which was deliberately kept alive around the ageing Queen”, Shakespeare subtly equates the failure of the Petrarchan rhetoric with that of the Elizabethan miniature’s aesthetics, revealing a common flaw in their mimetic power that will eventually lead to a novel poetic and visual language.