Symbols In Art: Mirrors & Reflections
From ancient tales to modern art, mirrors capture complex truths
The ancient world believed a person’s soul was contained in their reflection. If someone died, it was customary in some cultures to cover up all the mirrors in the house to ensure safe passage of the soul to the afterlife.
Mirrors hold us. Like ancient souls, we are prone to being ensnared in the pane of a looking glass. When we look at ourselves in a mirror, our gaze is returned by the very gaze that looks. We see ourselves watching ourselves. Like Narcissus, whom Ovid tells was punished for spurning the love of Echo, we can become entranced by our own reflection, pining after the mysterious other in the mirror or pool.
Something of the ambiguity of mirrors is apparent when we see someone else looking at their reflection. Is their expression not curiously altered? A loved-one peering into a mirror adopts a ‘mirror face’, usually a more solemn and noble version than their real set of shimmering expressions. It is somehow a fleeting thing, this pretend face, one that is released from existence as soon as they step away from the mirror. The truth they imagine they find in their reflection is thus revealed as a kind of distortion.
In the same vein, the symbolic meaning of mirrors in art is wonderfully ambiguous. Two contradictory themes emerge, one associated with the virtue of truth (for the mirror is said not to lie) and the other with a perversion of truth, with vanity and the dark quality of luxury.
But perhaps the two themes are not so contradictory after all, for what unites them is the sense of something being revealed: the idea is that mirrors reflect a hidden truth, perhaps a window to an ‘anti-world’, a more unvarnished version of our own. We are accustomed to demons and supernatural creatures having no reflection on account of being dispossessed of a soul. Thus, as a means of disclosure, the image that appears in a mirror can be thought of as being more revealing that the mere surface appearance.
Hence, in art, the depiction of a mirror is usually for some allegorical purpose. It is a way of saying, “There lies a deeper truth here.”
Several personifications of the Deadly Sins are shown holding mirrors. Pride (Latin Superbia) is sometimes shown holding a mirror in which the image of Satan can be seen. The sin of Lust (or ‘Luxury’; Latin Luxuria, Libido) often holds a mirror too, symbolizing woman’s vanity and hence her power to seduce. (Lust was thought to pertain principally to women; for men, Avarice or greed was the equivalent vice.)
In such a way, the mirror as a symbol in art became closely connected with women, so that images of women peering into mirrors are a commonplace theme in art history.
Sometimes represented in the Renaissance as a naked woman on a couch, or else a woman in her private chamber, the mirror is one emblem of Vanitas. A ‘vanitas’ painting is a symbolic work of art expressing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death. She is usually attending to her hair with a comb and looking into a mirror as she does so. Sometimes an inscription on a scroll announces the Latin ‘Omnia Vanitas’ — ‘All is vanity’, with the figure surrounded by the earthly pleasures of jewels and gold coins. To underline the link between vanity and futility, the figure of Death sometimes appears too.
During the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the recumbent nude became merged with images of Venus, identified with the Greek Aphrodite, the goddess of love and fertility. One of the most well-known mirrors in art is that gazed into by Venus as painted by Diego Velázquez in 1644. Here, Venus is shown in her private chamber, stretched out on silk bedclothes whilst her mischievous offspring Cupid holds up a mirror so she can enjoy her own beauty (whilst we, the viewer, are meant to do the same).
In Renaissance times, humanist scholars began to associate the sensual gratification of Lust with Love in the person of Venus, conflating beauty, vanity, and sexuality to symbolize the seductively illicit. The motif of the mirror helps to make this conflation yet more tantalizing, for it becomes difficult to tell if Velázquez’s Venus is more concerned with herself or if she is secretly looking at us in the reflection. Such games of hide-and-seek would have provided a 17th century viewer with a teasing form of entertainment.
Truth and Prudence
Yet whilst Vanitas art flourished, it is important to account for the other symbolic meaning of mirrors that emerged during the Renaissance period.
The allegorical figure of Prudence — one of the four Classical Virtues — is often shown holding a mirror to signify wise conduct through self-knowledge. For the bearer of the mirror, to be able to see her or himself as they really are is a sign of wisdom. Hence Prudence is personified as a woman looking into a mirror whilst holding onto a snake — the latter being derived from Matthew (10:16) ‘Be ye wise as serpents’.
Like Prudence, the figure of Truth is similarly shown holding a mirror, the reflection of which is not meant to lie. The figure of Truth is often depicted alongside that of Time, based on the idea that truth will be revealed over time, supported by the ancient saying ‘Veritas filia temporis’ — ‘Truth is the daughter of Time’.
In the painting An allegory of Truth and Time (1584) by Annibale Carracci, Truth can be seen holding a mirror, with Father Time having just ‘revealed’ her from the depths of the well out of which he climbs. Truth radiates light while two-faced Deceit is trampled under her feet.
Modern Female Artists
The subtle ambiguities of mirror symbolism were not lost on modern artists, most notably female artists who were able to reclaim the mirror as a means of disrupting the centuries-old stereotype of the vanity of women.
In the tradition of self-portraiture, many female artists have engaged with the interplay of ‘views’ offered by a mirror, highlighting the artist’s awareness of the audience’s participation in the image and the possibility of subverting the normal interrogation of the female subject as an object of masculine desire.
In a work like Self-portrait by Ilse Bing, the photographer takes her own photo by pointing the camera out at the viewer; meanwhile her own image is captured twice, once from the front and once from the side. The inclusion of a mirror serves to give the artist a sense of agency, destabilizing the power-play between audience and subject, and opening up the work to a more intricate reading.
The relationship between reality and appearance is not less complex in our age. Building upon the deep ambiguities of mirrors, modern artists have continued to use this ancient symbol to explore the endlessly perplexing notions of identity that the modern world continues to find pressing.
Christopher P Jones’ is the author of Exploring Art History, an introduction to some of the most pivotal topics in art history and appreciation.
Would you like to get…
More articles like this? Sign up to Medium here.
