In the previous chapter, I argued that Shakespeare deployed the powers of ekphrasis to reveal the subjectivity of characters in his plays. And I proposed that in The Winter's Tale he silently referenced the reputation of Giulio Romano for creating lifelike representational objects to counterpoint Leontes’ purely mental representations of the visible actions of his wife and childhood friend. Some two hours, therefore, before his name was even mentioned, Giulio was already present in the imagined world of the play, though he did not come to audibility until the gossipy penultimate scene. Then, after the Third Gentleman has described the reunion of King Leontes and his daughter Perdita—who is accompanied by Florizel, her betrothed, pursued by his father, King Polixenes of Bohemia and the courtier Camillo, along with the two shepherds and Autolycus—he is asked by a fellow Gentleman what the royal families did next. I now quote his reply in full:

So eager is the Third Gentleman to express his admiration of Giulio Romano's skill that he turns a simple one-sentence answer into three distinct grammatical periods, leaving the first one, with its heaped-up modifying clauses, dangling without its complement until he catches his breath. But his amplification provides a staged advertisement for the artist, a man of nearly supernatural powers, it would seem, and cues the theater audience that they are about to see something marvelous.

As we know, what they see is something even more marvelous than was advertised: someone has “put Breath into his Worke” and those who “would speake to her, and stand in hope of answer” are answered. In a dramatic demonstration of the rhetorical figure litotes (disguised understatement) Shakespeare is doing Giulio one better.