Mirror

There is a specular effect vividly described by Leonardo da Vinci that can still be encountered in funfair halls of mirrors today. In one of his notebooks, dating to the decades around 1500, Leonardo explains what happens if ‘two mirrors are placed in such a manner as to face each other exactly’ (II. Linear Perspective; par. 65). One mirror will reflect and be reflected in the other, the Italian Renaissance artist, scientists and mirror-writing enthusiast observes: ‘and so, image within image, they go on to infinity in such a manner as that each mirror has within it a mirror, each smaller than the last, and one inside the other’.

Leonardo da Vinci. ‘Notes and Diagrams on Optics, Concerning the Caustics of Reflection’ (c. 1503-5). British Library Arundel 263, f.86v. © The British Library Board.

This curious effect of infinite mirroring is useful to illustrate the multiple role mirrors themselves played in early modern England. As material objects, they had already existed for centuries, mostly made of polished metals like steel or bronze. As Venetian craftsmen popularised the trade in mirrors made from crystal glass, however, increasing varieties began to circulate at the same time: from convex (reducing the size of the reflected object) to concave (drawing the reflected object closer) to plane. Manufactured from an assortment of materials — from high-quality clear crystal to low-quality coloured glass or metals of different sorts — mirrors were virtually everywhere in the sixteenth century.

As a result of such technological developments, the quality of mirrors increasingly improved in the decades covering the reigns of Elizabeth I and James VI and I (roughly, the 1550’s to the 1620s). Intertwined, perhaps, with the growing awareness of an individual human self, so often linked to the humanist movement of the period, the immaculate reflections in these new looking glasses were sometimes connected with new levels of knowledge. Although sometimes, as in George Gascoigne’s satire The Steele Glas (1576), the opposite could also be the case. Gascoigne and others condemned these glasses as beguiling their viewer because they imitated reality to a degree that made it hard to distinguish between true and false images.

Group of Objects, including ‘Shew-stone’, or Magic Mirror with Mirror Case. British Museum 1838, 1232.90.b. Late 16th Century. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Due to their reflective properties, mirrors were associated both with inward essence and outward appearances, and as much with science as with magic. Reflecting glasses, for example, were crucial instruments in the course of the early-seventeenth century’s scientific revolution, and mirrors were components of tools like telescopes or microscopes from their earliest prototypes onwards. Yet they were also employed in the period by so-called ‘scryers’ and other persons engaged in occult practices. Allegedly, magic mirrors could predict the future, expose thieves, and — as the famous Elizabethan astrologer and mathematician John Dee seems to have believed — be employed as a means of communication with other-worldly beings (the dramatic potential of mirrors, in such a context, is explored elsewhere in the series). Indeed, a mirror could even act as a scientific and occult tool at the same time. Thus, some imposters, under the pretence of ‘magic’ performance, applied their knowledge of the physical properties of mirrors to create optical illusions. This is what illusionists still do today, except that performers like David Copperfield usually do not claim to possess supernatural powers.

Mirrors, too, can expand the field of vision and make visible what normally would be hidden from human view. Long, even, before the early modern period, specular objects built the base of legends, featuring rulers who employed so-called ‘imperial mirrors’ to oversee their realms. As retold in several accounts of travellers from the European continent in the decades around 1600, Henry VII (the founder of the Tudor dynasty) was among a number of early modern monarchs who were rumoured to have employed such a magically-endowed telescopic mirror for surveillance purposes. By contrast, Henry’s granddaughter Elizabeth — although (or, perhaps, because) she was known to be rather vain — was said to have avoided the clear reflections of unimpaired mirrors throughout the final decades of her life. It wasn’t until shortly before her death, the often-quoted story goes, that she again asked for a looking glass. Facing the truth of her naturally aged face, she furiously accused those who had flattered her appearance all her life.

As this anecdote about Elizabeth implies, looking glasses — as tools used for beautifying the face — also became symbols of vanity. Various engravings from the Middle Ages onwards show the (mostly female) descendants of the mythical mirror-gazer Narcissus confidently looking at themselves in a mirror as they were approached from behind by the figure of death or the devil. Mirrors were regular elements in still life portraiture, too, and remain to this day closely associated with the harmful influence of fashion. Looking admiringly at one’s outward appearance was commonly considered a sin, just as focusing piously on one’s inward nature was, for the most part, considered a virtue.

‘Of Pride’ from Stephen Batman, A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation (London, 1569). Leaf H3 recto. Folger Shakespeare Library (LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection). CC BY-SA 4.0.

Thus, the iconology of mirrors — as both object and word — covered a broad spectrum of meaning. The mirror was a symbol of pride and prudence, truth and falsity, feminine weakness and masculine prowess, god and the devil. The three English terms mostly used in the early modern period to refer to a reflective surface are mirror, (looking) glass, and speculum. Mirror is borrowed from the French mireor (miroir in modern French), possibly derived from the Latin mirare (‘to admiringly look at’). In Shakespeare’s Richard II (c. 1595), the deposed king asks an officer to bring ‘a mirror hither straight, / That it may show me what a face I have, / Since it is bankrupt of his majesty’ (4.1.258-260). Notably, when Richard’s rival Bolingbroke repeats the order, he commands the officer to ‘fetch a looking glass’ (261). This usage of both terms within only a few lines might hint at their synonymous meanings. It might also, however, quite contrarily, imply a contrast between Richard’s wish for self-reflection in an ‘honest’ mirror made of steel, and the vain gaze into a glass that is permitted by Bolingbroke to his predecessor (or, suitably enough, vice versa). Clearly, in the case of early modern mirrors, words reflected materialities. The Latin noun speculum even gave its name to an entire genre of books, offering mirror-images for specific groups of readers, ranging from virgins to princes. Instead of reflecting things as they were, these speculum books (as their titles introduced them) presented paradigms — desired and non-desired conditions — with the aim of prompting a change of behaviour in their readers.

Endowed with such a variety of meanings, mirrors were readily used as both symbolically charged stage props and as potent textual metaphors by many dramatists of the period. Besides the mirror scene in Richard II, there are numerous other examples to be found in plays by Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, and others. ‘Give me that glass, and therein will I read’ (4.1.269), says Richard in Shakespeare’s history play. Doubtless, there was a lot to read in a/the mirror as it surfaced in various (and often contradictory) contexts across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its infinite reflection of meaning(s) makes mirror one of the crucial ‘keywords’ of the period.

Valentina Finger is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich.

Selected Bibliography.

Richter, Jean Paul (ed.) The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (New York, 1970), Vol I.

Shakespeare, William. Richard II, ed. Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin (Oxford, 2011).

9 April 2021.