Art Mirrors Art

Egbert van Heemskerck - De chirurgijn Jacob Fransz Hercules en zijn gezin in zijn barbierswinkel {Portrait of the family of Jacob Fransz Hercules in his barber’s shop} (c.1669)

The rectangular object attached to the central bar of the window is a small barber’s mirror; its placement is practical - a customer could see his face well in the daylight falling through the window:

Inge Löök - Postcard №85 (Two old ladies in the millinery shop) (2025)

This is one of the latest additions to the decade-long saga of the two babushkas, colourfully told through postcards by the Finnish illustrator.

It is also only the second postcard with a mirror - and I have a certain feeling that AMA somehow triggered its appearance :)

For years, Inge Löök had only one mirror postcard, this one:

It is №12 in her catalogue, and it was created no later than 2016.

I know it was her only postcard with a mirror because Inge Löök said so herself. Well, not to me, but to a friend of mine who once approached her at a book fair in Finland and asked if she had any postcards with mirrors.

After thinking for a moment, she said, 'Yes, this one' - and brought this card. She even signed it - and this card was eventually sent to me, so I now have it with her signature.

Apparently, she herself was surprised that she had only one card with a mirror; reportedly she murmured something like 'Perhaps I should draw another one' - at least, that is what my friend told me.

So, voilà - we now have the Second Mirror Postcard by Inge Löök!

This coin-like piece is more on the exotic side of my AMA collection; it's actually not a coin but a biblical medal. The design is attributed to the Hungarian medalist Joachim Elsholtz, and its was struck from silver in 1588 in Kremnica Mint (one of the oldest in Europe).

Its back (recto) side depicts the scene of the Sacrifice of Manoah, and the head (verso) side shows the scene of the Annunciation: We see Gabriel approaching Mary, with the dove of the Holy Spirit soaring above her. The first line of the inscriptions reads GOT · SCHICKT · D · GABRIEL, God sends Gabriel The second seems to be D · V · VERK · EMANVEL - who announces Emanuel to us. Emanuel refers to Christ, a variant of Immanuel, Hebrew for 'God with us'

The object that hangs in the Mary's bed behind her is unlikely a mirror in this particular case - most probably it's an icon, or a religions medallion of some kind.

But a) it actually could be a mirror, and b) mirrors were frequently used instead of these 'icons' (thus becoming the icons themselves).

Leonardo Devito - Mirrorino (2025)

Claudio Bravo - Untitled (Interior with Colored Papers) (1986)

Mihály Zichy (aka Michael von Zichy) - The Emperor’s Anteroom at Tsarskoye Selo (1856) This is an example of the early style of Zichy, who became famous for these accurate, nearly photorealistic depictions of interiors and people. We can be pretty sure it's how the room of the private apartments of the Russian Emperor Alexander II at the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, an imperial residence, looked like at this time - up to the smallest details.

We also see an accurate depiction of one of the so called 'Arabs (or Araps) of the Imperial Court' (арабы/арапы Высочайшего двора), a small, privileged group of Black servants who traditionally served Russian Tzars. Here this arap dressed in exotic livery holds a hookah - Alexander II was knowingly a heavy hookah smoker, the habit he picked up during his trip to Caucasus in 1850. All this is nice, but my main interest was the object that we see on the table:

Mihály Zichy (Michael von Zichy) - Erotic scene (c.1890s) Zichy was an excellent draftsman who left behind a huge body of highly accurate drawings, including, but not limited to, scenes of life at the Russian imperial court (he actually lived in Russia for most of his life, and died there, in Saint Petersburg).

Yet, despite his sharp eye and skilled hand - or perhaps because of them? - he is mainly remembered as the author of erotic, often explicitly pornographic, drawings (this one, in fact, is more on the mild side).

I used to share some of them here, but Tumblr consistently bans them and eventually erases them, even from my own stream. An interesting linguistic vignette: this type of three-panel mirror - like the one we see above the washstand - was called called трельяж (treillage) in Russian (still is, to my knowledge).

The word, however, has nothing to do with what treillage means in French: lattice-like structures placed in gardens and parks (the English word for these is trellis).

Apparently, a peculiar semantic shift took place in Russia, perhaps because of misinterpreting the 'tre-' part of the word as related to three. Over time, трельяж became the standard Russian name for this type of mirrors.

Mihály Zichy (aka Michael von Zichy - sometimes even Count van Zichy) - Gallant scene (aka The Seducer) (c.1891)

Oil on canvas, ~38x47 cm The painting is in the collection of the National Museum of Art of Moldova (!); apparently, they keep it as is, frameless:

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: