8. Excerpt from Chapter 3, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, by Sir Philip Sidney (1590)

[The early modern admiration for lifelike paintings, statues, tapestry, and other artwork often finds expression in literary descriptions praising art for its natural appearance, as in act 2, scene 4, where Iachimo describes Imogen's chamber to Posthumus, and the excerpt below from Sir Philip Sidney's romance, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia.]

In the midst of all the place was a fair pond whose shaking crystal was a perfect mirror to all the other beauties, so that it bare show of two gardens, one indeed, the other in shadows, and in one of the thickets was a fine fountain made thus: a naked Venus of white marble, wherein the graver had used such cunning that the natural blue veins of the marble were framed in fit places to set forth the beautiful veins of her body. At her breast she had her babe Aeneas, who seemed, having begun to suck, to leave that, to look upon her fair eyes, which smiled at the babe's folly, the meanwhile, the breast running.

Hard by was a house of pleasure built for a summer retiring place, whither Kalander leading him, he found a square room full of delightful pictures made by the most excellent workman of Greece. There was Diana when Actaeon saw her bathing, in whose cheeks the painter had set such a color as was mixed between shame and disdain, and one of her foolish nymphs, who weeping and withal lowering, one might see the workman meant to set forth tears of anger.

In another table was Atalanta, the posture of whose limbs was so lively expressed that if the eyes were the only judges, as they be the only seers, one would have sworn the very picture had run, besides many mo[re], as of Helena, Omphale, Iole, but in none of them all beauty seemed to speak so much as in a large table which contained a comely old man with a lady of middle age but of excellent beauty, and more excellent would have been deemed but that there stood between them a young maid whose wonderfulness took away all beauty from her but that which it might seem she gave her back again by her very shadow. And such difference being known that it did indeed counterfeit a person living was there between her and all the other, though goddesses, that it seemed the skill of the painter bestowed on the other new beauty but that the beauty of her bestowed new skill of the painter.