Giulio Romano

Giulio Romano is the only visual artist Shakespeare ever names. In The Winter's Tale a lifelike statue is credited to that rare Italian master, Giulio Romano, a strange afterlife for a painter who had been dead for decades and never carved marble at all. It shows how far his fame as a maker of astonishing illusions had travelled.

He was Raphael's most gifted pupil in Rome, and when Raphael died young in 1520 Giulio helped finish the master's unfinished walls. Then he moved to Mantua to serve its duke, and there he became something wilder. As both architect and painter he built and decorated the Palazzo del Te, a pleasure villa where the rules of good taste are deliberately roughed up.

Its most notorious room is the Chamber of the Giants, where painted rocks and columns seem to crash down on the viewer from every wall and ceiling, the whole space collapsing in a storm sent by the gods. Giulio spent the rest of his career remaking Mantua as its chief artist and city architect, and died there in 1546, just as he was being called to take charge of the works at St Peter's in Rome.