Reflecting on the Body: Giorgione’s Missing Mirror.
One of the most famous examples of the use of a mirror in a Renaissance's painter’s studio is only known through written accounts because the painting itself has not survived. This is Giorgione’s lost painting of a nude who was represented with its back towards the viewer and its other sides visible by Giorgione’s clever use of reflections: one side was imaged in a mirror; another in shining armour; finally, the front was turned away from the viewer and reflected in a pool. The loss of such a dazzling configuration of reflections is much to be deplored, as is a similar painting of nudes by Jan van Eyck. As Svetlana Alpers notes in her survey of Dutch art in the seventeenth-century- where Giorgione's last masterpiece is mentioned by Dutch art theorists- the Italian’s method deconstructed the body rather than showing it unified, the body being something Italian artists were reluctant to chop up into reflections as they wanted to keep a unified view; however, one way of preserving the unity of the figure was simply to double it as in the example of the bowmen in Pollaiuolo’s Martyrdom of St Sebastian, a device known as figura come fratelli.1 Giorgione’s nude is mentioned in the Netherlander artist Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Academy of Painting where he also references a print a(above) after a lost painting by Hendrick Goltzius showing Venus looking into a mirror. This image contains three images of Venus: her body, her reflection in the mirror, and the image of her that the artist is depicting.2 As we shall see this week, in addition to conveying limpidity and accuracy, the painter’s mirror also distorts and produces monstrosities. It is an ambivalent aid to representing the self.
1Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth-Century, (University of Chicago, Penguin, 1983), 59.
2Ibid.
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