ABSTRACT
The ancient painter Zeuxis starred in two anecdotes on the imitation of nature obsessively repeated in the Renaissance. According to the first one, he painted a young boy who held “a dish well charged with Grapes, with so much art in deede” that birds came to pick at them. Instead of being flattered, Zeuxis was enraged and said that if he had painted the boy “with equall skill”, the birds would have never dared to approach him.1 Shakespeare underscores this note of longing when he has his Venus languish like those “poor birds, deceived with painted grapes”, which “[d]o surfeit by the eye” (VA 601-2); this Venus seems to combine the experience of artworks with Ovidian myths of frustrated touch like that of Narcissus.2
