"A painted devil": the matter and making of images in Macbeth

Allusions to image-making play a significant role in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Most notably, Lady Macbeth refers to painting to describe Duncan’s corpse and the bloodstains resulting from his murder. In particular, she compares the dead king to “a painted devil” and claims that she will “gild” his grooms with blood in order to frame them as murderers (2.2.53-54). Lady Macbeth’s language and actions are here idolatrous, as she treats royal, divine blood as an artificial pigment that she may reapply and erase as she chooses in a diabolical act of picture-making. Previous critical analyses of these allusions to paint figure Lady Macbeth’s investment in the visual as a symptom of her superficiality and radical detachment from the interpretation of meaning. This essay argues for a different view: that Lady Macbeth’s error is to assume that the visible world is merely superficial, since, in early modern contexts, meaning is invested in the matter and processes that make images. To make this case, the essay sets Lady Macbeth’s allusions to paint and painting alongside early modern writings on the visual arts, such as Richard Haydocke’s 1598 translation of Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’ Arte, della pitura, scoltura et architettura. I contend that Lady Macbeth’s engagements with painting invert and distort specific advice on painterly ideals and that similar inversions of early modern guidance on painting take place in Massinger’s The Picture. Through a comparison between these plays, the essay concludes that dramatists use allusions to image-making to comment on the meaning of spectacle in theater