Fifteen Eighty Four

What is a painting?  An application of coloured pigments to a flat surface, be it a wall, a canvas, or a panel.  My book poses this question in historical perspective, to ask: what was a Renaissance painting understood to be?  The answer is that a painting, defined as representation, was understood as a mirror-image of the visible world. 

In the words of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter and art critic, Samuel van Hoogstraten: “Painting is the mirror of nature; it makes things that are not there appear to exist and deceive.”  Caravaggio’s depiction of Narcissus may be said to represent Hoogstraten’s pictorial claim.  The ancient myth of Narcissus told of a youth who, in the heat of a summer’s day, took shelter by a woodland pool.  Captivated by the sight of his reflection on the water’s surface, Narcissus so loved this image of himself that he reached out to embrace it.  Caravaggio represents the boy leaning over the water’s edge, his arms and body arched in longing for the beautiful, but ineffable, image reflected back to him.  Like a mirror-reflection, painting’s representations are only ever impalpably present, a visual image of the world conjured by fictions of colour, light, and form. 

My book addresses the early modern conceptualisation of painting as a mirror-image, to argue this was the key development of Renaissance art.  The analogy between painting and mirroring was advanced in Renaissance art theory, demonstrated in art practice, and represented within painting itself.  To further the example of Caravaggio above, documents tell us he owned mirrors, and biographers relate he used them as aids in his art.  His painting of Narcissus further suggests the use of two mirrors: one to pictorialise his model of a youth, another for his model to gaze upon, in order to render the visual effect of a mirroring pool.  In this way, Caravaggio theorised the idea of painting as a mirror-image, and also exemplified the use of mirrors in painterly practice, as a method for translating visual observation into two-dimensional form. Thus the mirror-reflection became, both in the artist’s studio and in artistic representation, the instrument and the definition of what a painting was.  This far-reaching pictorial paradigm of specular painting perdured from the early Renaissance to the early twentieth century, sundered only with the advent of abstraction. 

The temporal frame of my study opens with the inauguration of the perspectival ‘mirror’ of painting in early fifteenth-century Florentine art theory by Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti, who posed the question of painting’s reflection: “What else can you call painting but [the invention of Narcissus], embracing with art what is presented on the surface of the water?” This arose alongside the pictorialized mirrors of Netherlandish oil painting initiated by Jan van Eyck.  In the Arnolfini portrait, its celebrated mirror reflects back the fictive space of the painting to suggest our specular inclusion within it.  The conceptualisation of painting as a mirror-image is further manifest in the High Renaissance emergence of new genres of art circa 1500, chiefly self-portraiture, and the painted female nude accompanied by a mirror to display her form from multiple perspectives.  The inset mirror reflection reached a ‘Baroque’ apogee in the art of Velazquez, in the painted mirrors of the Rokeby Venus and Las Meninas.   Las Meninas is the early modern summa of my study, in drawing together the Renaissance pictorial history of the embedded mirror-image as the allegory of painting.  The Galerie des glaces at Versailles then concludes my book’s account of the early modern mirror-reflection.  For Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors deployed a gilt-framed arcade of mirrors to usurp the conventional place of painting in the decoration of the gallery wall.  As its earliest critics ably recognised, Versailles posited the mirror-image as painting’s equivalent, able to reflect the king at court just like painted encomia of his rule.  The example of Versailles, like Las Meninas, marks the Baroque culmination of the relationship between painting and mirroring that forms the subject of my book.

Alongside pictorial histories of the inset-mirror motif within painting, my book also maps a history of mirrors as a decorative art.  For it was during the Renaissance that advances in glass-making enabled the production of the silvered-glass mirror, and its rapid diffusion.  The Renaissance mirror became a luxury decorative art of the female dressing table and the architectural interior.  From the late fifteenth century, it was manifest in jewelled compact and pedestal mirrors, as also pictorialized in representations of the female nude.  As glass-making technology advanced, mirrors also graced the walls of female dressing rooms and collectors’ cabinets, as instruments of display and enhanced light.  I open and close my discussion of the decorative mirror with Versailles’ Grande Galerie, because its example propelled new-found technologies for large-scale production of full-length mirrors and windows for the first time.  Versailles thus paved the way for the newly light-filled interiors of eighteenth-century architectural conception. 

Beyond art-historical sources, my book also pursues the history of the mirror across further aspects of early modern visual culture as an instrument of light- and image-reflection with widespread uses across the arts and sciences.  Mirrors in early modern optical instruments included the Galilean telescopes and microscopes that led its scientific ‘revolution’, as well as the optical mirrors displayed in catoptric chambers of Renaissance Wunderkammern.  In the artisan’s workshop, the mirror was the early modern draughtsman’s means of accurate transcription of the visible field for the purposes of cartography, architecture and engineering, sciences, and painting, too. In the artist’s studio, the idea of painting as a mirror thus turned on a growing approximation between them, in both theory and practice.  Artists used mirroring instruments to facilitate the translation of the visible world into a two-dimensional surface as models for their imitation, so that practice itself further inculcated a specular theorisation of painting.  This crystallised in the representation of mirror-images within paintings as heightened depictions of art’s deceit.  

As a visual corollary to the Shakespearian motif of the play-within-the-play and so of early modernity’s cultural production more broadly, the painted inset mirror-image, or painting-within-painting, was understood as a pictorial emblem of its own art.  As pictorial metaphors of the art of painting, painted inset mirror-images such as the Arnolfini portrait and Las Meninas encapsulated key critical and pictorial concerns of the period in representing the power of the artist to capture the perfect semblance of life. The concomitant rise of the mirror-image analogy across early modern literature is also significant: from Caxton’s encyclopaedic Myrrour of the World, the political theories of the speculum principis tradition, to romance and devotional poetry on the eye and heart as the mirrors of love.  These inter-relationships between poetic imagery of the mirror, its pictorialized representation in art, and new scientific technologies of observation, drive my book’s fully interdisciplinary analysis of the mirror as the emblem and instrument of the early modern visible field.  Like the modern light-bulb icon, the early modern mirror was an instrument of light, and thereby the figure of ideation.  Within painting, it signalled the intelligence of art.  The contextualising histories advanced here offer a new understanding of the early modern mirror metaphor as a prism of all forms of knowledge, to enable a deeper analysis of the specular configuration of early modern painting and its manifestations in literature, science, and art.