The Mirror in Art: Vanitas, Veritas, and Vision

Humankind’s venerable obsession with the mirror, traceable to the ancient myths of Medusa and Narcissus, is copiously attested in Western art, which historically relied on the mirror as both practical tool and polysemous trope. While the mirror’s reflective capacities encouraged its identification with the vaunted mimetic function of literature and film, its refractive quality enabled artists to explore and comment on perspective, in the process challenging the concept of art’s faithful representation of phenomena. My radically compressed and selective overview of the mirror’s significance in Western iconography focuses primarily on visibility, gaze, and gender, dwelling on key moments and genres that most vividly illustrate the paradoxes of the mirror as both symbol and utilitarian object. Comparing Russian art with its Western counterpart, I argue that Russia’s distinctive iconographic traditions account for Russian divergences from major aspects of the inherited and evolving mirror rhetoric that prevailed in Western Europe. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol34/iss2/7 Vision, Vanitas, and Veritas: The Mirror in Art Helena Goscilo The Ohio State University The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror. Leonardo da Vinci, “On Painting” Though the clear-glass mirror as we know it today was a relatively late refinement, perfected in the sixteenth century by the renowned craftsmen of Murano, Italy, ancient cultures had at hand two readily available substances endowed, however imperfectly, with the specular capacity to reflect phenomena: polished metal and water. Indeed, the myths of Medusa and Narcissus, two of the most popular and influential Greek narratives focused on the dangers of vision and perceived self-image, hinge on the reflective properties of both metal and water while instancing the paradoxes and ambiguities of bona fide and surrogate mirrors, their uses, and their users. Mythological Mirrors Medusa means seduction ... a dangerous attraction. Gianni Versace, Interview with Mark Seal (1996) [T]he inventor of painting, according to the poets, was Narcissus. What is painting, after all, but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the