This kind of referential pictorialism is joined by many more pictorial passages in which images are devised and heavily inventoried with thick descriptions that create, rather than simply refer to, pictures. Sidney uses more than twenty such iconographic analogies in the revised Arcadia, almost all from classical mythology or history. She is greedily intent on the gold, not the Jovian miracle likewise, Basilius’s December-May infatuation with Zelmane is unseemly and ridiculous in an elderly married king, whose Petrarchan gesture of supplication is debased by the comparison. Basilius, analogized with the eager old woman whose active gesture (in the paintings) is always distinctively contrasted with the passive, exposed, often slumbering Danaë, is bathetically likened to the imposed, risible servant. This deft, almost casual, allusion is not expanded upon or investigated, but instead works as a kind of shorthand for a culturally specific universe in which Ovidian stories are interpolated by Renaissance artists with grasping crones confronted with unexpected opportunities for gain. His prompt urges us to recall such a picture so that we can visualize the scene and decode the analogy between the Arcadian and the mythic narrative. The rhetorical deployment of a well-known pictorial referent-by which he invokes a mental picture that is specified as a particular painting or type of painting-allows him to imply and emphasize quite a lot about the local situation in Arcadia.
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It hardly matters which painted version of the myth Sidney is referring to-with his wide continental experience it is likely he saw more than one-because he refers here and elsewhere to pictures as if they were standard, easily recognized images. The Danaë incident was a popular theme in sixteenth-century art: it was painted by, among others, Titian, Tintoretto, Artemisia and Orazio Gentileschi, and Goltzius, all of whom include a wizened maid (not mentioned in Ovid) who is reaching for or pointing at the falling shower, which is sometimes depicted as gold coins. Basilius, too, is responding to an oracle prompting him to seclude his daughters, a protection penetrated, in less Zeus-like fashion, by Pyrocles and his cousin Musidorus (see Figure 1).
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In the myth, Danaë’s father is told by an oracle that he will be killed by the son of his daughter accordingly he incarcerates her in a tower to keep her childless and avoid this fate, but Zeus appears to Danaë in a shower of gold and impregnates her with her son, Perseus. That Basilius is in love with a cross-dressed man (in a plot familiar from Shakespeare to Some Like It Hot) occasions the usual comedy of errors, but Sidney thickens the generic brew with his Danaë reference. 1īasilius, the foolish senex who little realizes that his daughter Philoclea is the object of the beautiful Amazon Zelmane’s attentions, does not detect that “Zelmane” is the disguise of the heroic young Prince Pyrocles. 1585), Philip Sidney pictures a comic moment:īasilius … having combd and trickt himself more curiously, then at any time fortie winters before, comming where Zelmane was, … and loth to loose the precious fruite of time, he presented himselfe unto her, falling downe upon both his knees, and holding up his hands, as the old governesse of Danaë is painted, when she sodainly saw the golde shoure, O heavely woma, or earthly Goddesse (said he) let not my presence be odious unto you, nor my humble suit seeme of small weight in your eares.