Mirrors

Mirrors and reflections are enormously important in art, and so common a theme, that you should keep an eye out for them: they will help explain the work’s underlying meaning. Here’s why. The mind has been likened to a mirror for as long as humans have written, painted, sculpted, etched and composed poetry. The Greek root for Plato’s word idea, eidos, literally means not just image or likeness but an image reflected in water or mirror.{ref1} Even in English, minds reflect and speculate. So, since all true art depicts the artist’s mind, mirrors and reflections are bound to play a highly significant role. Mirrors suggest that the viewer should turn inwards to gain self-knowledge rather than outwards to the natural world. In paintings, the discovery that the surface itself represents a mirror contradicts the very principles on which conventional art history is based: that artists depict the world outside. Indeed it is only once you accept that artists do not depict material reality that you begin see so many mirrors in art because you cannot see what you do not believe.

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Here is an example. No-one to my knowledge has ever noted that Velazquez’s iconic masterpiece Las Meninas, once known as The Painting of Paintings, is not a naturalistic depiction of the Royal Family but a reflection in its entirety. Depicting his mind as a mirror, the Spaniard composed the painting as though the canvas itself, across its entire surface, is a giant looking-glass. In the center, in the distance, he painted a second, smaller mirror with the king and queen looking back out at us (or, more accurately, him.) They are him, as any alchemist of the time might have recognized: royal symbols of the creative mind in spiritual perfection, united androgynously, male and female. The whole canvas is his mind; the small mirror his inner eye. It is a theme repeated time and again, from Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait to Edouard Manet’s Olympia and beyond.

For all true artists, even atheists like Picasso, our minds are a reflection of God or, put less religiously, the cosmic power of Creation. Many mystics have described our minds as a mirror of God, even St. Paul, the founder of the Church as an Establishment. He wrote: “Now we all, with unveiled face, reflecting the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, are being changed from glory to glory into his own image, for this comes from the Lord who is now Spirit.”{ref2}

Believe this, if you can, because if you do your understanding of art, which artists think is virtually synonmous with true aesthetic satisfaction, will be enriched.

1. Thomas Moore, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books) 1989, p. 51

2. 2 Corinthians 2:18

All Articles (Alphabetical by Artist, then Title)

Learn how a common pose in art carries specific meaning, regardless of subject matter

Over-the-Shoulder Poses

Artists not only feel at one with nature; they become one with nature

Perugino and Stubbs as Lions

How to make sense of Picasso's misplaced eyes

Picasso’s An Artist (1968)

Learn how Picasso turns a model into himself

Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe (1905)

Two protagonists in one painting must both represent the artist. It's a given in art so it's your job to find out how.

Picasso’s Cat Catching a Bird (1939)

See how Picasso understood Manet's meaning, a meaning that still escapes art historians who think and see superficially

Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror (1932)

See how what looks outside is really inside

Picasso’s Man Looking in a Mirror (1969)

Not a particularly successful picture but an excellent learning tool

Picasso’s Portrait of Jacqueline (1965)

Hear how Karen Kleinfelder interprets Picasso's scene

Picasso’s Untitled Plate 58 from Suite 156 (1971)

See how Picasso writes his own identity over someone else's face

Picasso’s YO’s in Piero Crommelynck (1966-71)

See how an Impressionist painting is really constructed

Pissarro’s View of the Tuileries. Morning (1900)

If anyone thinks Raphael was unlettered, think again.

Raphael’s Expulsion of Heliodorus (1511-12)

Beware of biographical stories trying to explain a great portrait; they are rarely, if ever, true.

Raphael’s La Fornarina (1518-20)

How La Gravida can help make sense of the Mona Lisa...

Raphael’s La Gravida (1505-6)

Even simple sketches can be pregnant with meaning

Raphael’s Studies after Michelangelo’s David (1507-8)

How the setting is so rarely what you think....you must think differently

Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath (1643)

Several clues, easy to spot, reveal the true underlying meaning of two similar masterpieces

Rembrandt’s Man in Armour (1655) and Minerva (c.1655)

Learn how to look and what to look for, and how touching is painting

Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Saskia (c.1635)

Sometimes the simplest images are the most fascinating

Rembrandt’s The Skater (c.1631)

How there is more to a landscape by Rembrandt than meets the eye

Rembrandt’s The Three Trees (1643)

An essential question about any picture: does the figure resemble an artist at work?

Rembrandt’s Young Woman Leaning Against a Door (1657)

Look out for letters, even in this view of a bridge...

Renoir’s Pont Neuf, Paris (1872)

Once you see how Norman Rockwell, the so-called illustrator, turned contemporary politics into a contemplation on the creative process, you should start to appreciate how ageless the theme is.

Rockwell’s Before and After (1958)

A helpful and revealing interpretation by Mary Pardo

Savoldo’s Mary Magdalene (c1535-40)

How even in the 15th century an artist thought of himself as Christ...and said so.

Schongauer’s Christ Carrying the Cross (c.1475)

Even the most natural-looking portraits can be something other than they seem

Sloan’s Portrait of George Sotter (1902)

Think of animals in art as artists and you'll be surprised what you can see

Stubbs’ A Lion (1788)

See how a monkey becomes a painter

Stubbs’ Green Monkey (c.1774-5)

Bored by religious pictures? Think again.

Tintoretto’s St. Jerome in the Wilderness (1570’s)

How looking out for unusual features helps unlock meaning

Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-22)

Baudelaire's linking of Painting with cosmetics in the nineteenth century was not a novel idea, as long believed, but one with a very long history indeed

Titian’s Mary Magdalene(s) (c.1530-60)

Train your visual memory to recall similar poses in quite different situations; they usually have some meaning in common

Titian’s Pieta (c.1575)

See how Titian tricks us into thinking there is one reality in art when there are, at least, two

Titian’s Woman with a Mirror (1512-15)

See how the major mystery of Las Meninas can be resolved

Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656)

Artists often identify with other artists, using them as an alter ego. Here is an exceptionally clever one.

Whistler’s J. Becquet, Sculptor (1859)

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