The Self-Portrait, the Mirror & the Studio. 3

The Painter as Mirror.

Hidden at the back of Saenredam’s engraving after Goltzius is an old man with a pair of compasses which usually indicate what the renaissance called disegno. In the seventeenth-century, the figure of Disegno was usually shown holding a pair of compasses as in the illustration in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (above); but here Disegno also holds a mirror in his other hand. Disegno and composition was also linked explicitly with the object of the mirror. A good example of this is Leonardo da Vinci who in his Treatise on Painting compared the mirror to a painter: “the mind of a painter should be like a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is filled by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.”¹ And Vasari also included the phrases alla sphera and alla specchio, connected with the mirror into his remarks on self-portraiture.² But Vasari also linked the painter’s mirror with the hand: “this morning I made my face, portrayed in the mirror, with my hand.”³

1Leonardo da Vinci: Notebooks, (Oxford University Press, 1952, rep 2008), 206.

2Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, 31.

3Cited in ibid.