Art Mirrors Art

This print is often described simply as Shinagawa (品川); it's one of the prints from a large series Sōhitsu gojūsan tsugi (双筆五十三次), translated as The Fifty-three Stations by Two Brushes.

All prints of the series combined landscapes along the Tōkaidō with human scenes somehow associated with each station on this road. Created in 1854, the series was a collaboration between two Japanese famous ukiyo-e artists - perhaps, the most famous Two Brushes of this era - Utagawa Hiroshige, who created the landscape parts, and Utagawa Kunisada, who designed the figures.

So, the full title of the print is Shinagawa mijimai-beya (品川 身仕舞部屋), Shinagawa: Dressing Room (literally a Room for Getting Ready). Shinagawa, the first station outside Edo on your way to Kyoto, had a large 'pleasure district', so the the seated woman is interpreted as a courtesan, with a maid combing her hair to prepare for work. The courtesan is smoking a long kiseru pipe, a typical marker of her profession; the tobacco tray is standing beside her.

The courtesan is sitting in front of a mirror, but she is not looking at it - instead, she is just using it as a stand to place the book she reads while being combed:

This is not a usual book but keikobon (稽古本), a practice/rehearsal book with the lines of jōruri (浄瑠璃本), the scripted chants exclaimed during theater performances. High-level geishas were expected to entertain their guests with quite sophisticated musical and theatrical gigs.

Marie Vorobieff (aka Marevna - but actually Maria Bronislavovna Vorobyeva-Stebelska) - Red-Haired Nude Reclining on a Sofa before a Mirror (1972)

Attributed to Bernardino Licinio - Portrait of an architect with a self-portrait in a mirror (c.1530s) Oil on panel, ~ 60x80 cm

Recent studies revealed that it's not just 'an architect', but likely Sebastiano Serlio, indeed an Italian architect who lived in Venice from around 1527-28 until 1540-41 (then he moved to France, invited by Francis I himself).

And Bernardino Licinio was born and worked in Venice, too - which is kind of important for this story. Venice in general played a large role in the history of art, but we also know about one very specific pivot point in the history of mirrors that happened there.

In 1507, the brothers Andrea and Domenico d'Angelo dal Gallo received a 20-year privilege from the Venetian Council of Ten for their perfected method of making flat glass mirrors from cristallo glass. Venice would dominate the mirror business for roughly the next century and a half.

This remarkable transition from convex to flat mirrors was astonishingly well captured by two of the greatest Venetian artists of the era - the old Bellini and the young Titian. Both depicted scenes in which two different types of mirror are juxtaposed (both paintings are c. 1515s):

Notice how small these first flat mirrors were - the limitations of making flat sheets from blown glass didn't allow mirror-makers to produce very large ones.

So the mirror in the Licinio painting looks problematic. Judging from the size of the painting, it seems to be roughly 40-50 cm across - enormously large for an apparently flat glass mirror of around 1530. Not completely impossible, perhaps, but very, very doubtful.

Also, the frame looks suspiciously modern in its simplicity. We have an example of an early-16th-century mirror frame from Venice, currently in the collection of the MET, which looks almost architectural compared with the minimalist design in the Licinio:

Despite its monumental appearance, its actual mirror opening was only about 23 × 25 cm, smaller than your A4 sheet. Yet it was seen as HUGE by the contemporaries.

There are actually alternative attributions of this 'self-portrait' - for example, one of the scholars attributed the painting to Giovanni Battista Paggi, another Italian painter, and dated it to around 1580s For me the current attribution to Licinio is still more credible, but perhaps we need to rethink the meaning of the composition. If we take into account the technological context, it leans more towards an 'imagined mirror' than a literal self-portrait in an actual mirror.

Sebastiano Serlio was actually known less for his buildings than for his very influential treatise on architecture - where he described not only what architecture was, but what it should be. Perhaps this mirror works in a similar way: a kind of roadmap for how mirrors were imagined when the actual mirrors were not quite there yet.

The painting is now in the collection of the little-known Martin von Wagner Museum of the University of Würzburg, Germany. This is how it looks in its seemingly original frame:

I don't particularly like this 'art', but the picture of snow falling on a vast, empty beach is so very soothing during the sixth heatwave in a row that I can't resist.

The installation is called Chimera. It was designed by Enzo Zak Lux studio in collaboration with Denys Horodnyak; in essence, it's just 44 convex traffic mirrors mounted on industrial scaffolding and erected on a winter beach:

But the piece became a winner of the annual exhibition in Toronto called Winter Stations, and so we now read passages like this:

Chimera engages with the notion of mirage... and serves as a dialectical reflection on the fragmentation of physical and digital realities, exposing the delicate imbalance between control and security

and other such art-speaky b00lshit. This edition was held in February, so the snow. The piece looks pretty monumental in the photos above, but it was actually fairly small - the guys took the smallest (and cheapest) security mirrors available:

Came across this strange artifact in a local art museum (so it should be an artwork then) - it seems to be a small model of a room of some sort. It's described in Dutch as Maquette van een nachtverblijf voor vrouwen, or 'Model of a night accommodation for women', made around mid 1960s.

The English 'night accommodation' does not quite convey the actual meaning of the Dutch nachtverblijf - in real life it was more like an overnight cell, or a night shelter for women (perhaps homeless women, or women briefly detained that day - e.g., for drunkenness etc).

The model was made by a certain P.N. Stomph - who was actually a director of a prison (!) in Leeuwarden in the mid-1950s (that's the Netherlands - or Friesland, to be precise). So theoretically it may also represent a prison cell. Here is a close-up view from above:

We can see that this confinement room was furnished not only with a bed, but also with a table with a basin on it (maybe even a proper washstand) - and with a mirror (!)

It was difficult to take a picture of this mirror through the wire net; here is my best effort:

The museum adds the following rhetorical question to the otherwise very factual description of the piece (wood, metal, textile, ceramics):

What does it feel like to be confined in a small room, without a view but with the knowledge that others can see you at any moment?

I can only add an AMA version of it: What does it mean to look at yourself in a mirror, knowing that somebody can always watch you looking at yourself?

A couple of pics from the solar eclipse of yesterday with the use - if not mirrors, then at least some reflective surfaces; both weretaken in Spain, in Castell de Cabres, both by Eva Manez from Reuters (August 12, 2026)

My friend (the same one, with the frame-cutting skill) has sent me yet another picture, this time from the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm - of the painting by Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, The Mirror of Time (1628) I've shared it here already, but years ago, and of poor quality, so here it is, one more time:

It's oil painting on copper plate, ~ 40x50 cm It's called The Mirror of Time today (or De spiegel van de tijd in Dutch), though at the times of its creation the scene would be likely described as Vadertje Tijd (Father Time). Apparently the motif was popular as a few years later the painter created another, a bit larger (and a bit gender-swapped) version of the scene:

I suddenly realized that I never actually shared here this etching of Prudence by Hendrick Goltzius; he made it around 1600s, as a part of the series with all Christian virtues. The inscription reads:

Arcanas rerum scrutor Prudentia causas, Praeterita ancipiti vultu videoque futura.

which means:

I, Prudence, investigate the hidden causes of things; with my double face I see both the past and the future.

The design was very popular in the first half of the 17th century and was reproduced by many etchers, including Jacob Matham (whom this print is often attributed to). As with many works by Goltzius he copied, he mirrored the original:

A silver tankard (!) with Christian virtues (!!) Made in Germany around 1660s, the tankard depicts four virtues - Justice, Temperance, Prudence and Charity.

The Prudence (with mirror and snakes) borrows from the famous design by Hendrick Goltzius:

Ingel Fallstedt - Kvinna vid spegel {Woman by a Mirror} (c.1880s)