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• Dijana O. Apostolski, McGill University

Inside the Palazzo Colonna in Rome are four large, tilted, magnificently painted mirrors. The mirrors bear flowers, insects, and mischievous putti from a realm other than the Palazzo’s. This is not unprecedented. Mirrors proliferated early modern Europe and insidiously shaped interiors, spaces, habits, and bodies. According to thinkers, such as Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), mirrors, as delicate matter, faithfully emulated the spiritual realm and the soul. As such, they were often used as silent organizers of societal, gendered, and racialized norms that framed embodiment as a representation and the body as an image. This session seeks to probe our historical understanding of the relationship between mirrors, bodies, art, and architectural practices in the early modern context. It aims to examine how early modern European art and architectural theories and practices, expressed through writing, collecting, drawing, painting, modelling, and building, shaped and were shaped by the presence and design of mirrors.

keywords: early modern mirrors, the humoral body, matter, materiality, representation in art and architecture

session type: panel

Mario de’ Fiori, Giovanni Stanchi, and Carlo Maratta, painters, One of the Four Painted Mirrors, the Colonna Gallery, Colonna Palace, Rome (1670).

Epistemological Reflection: The Painted Mirrors in the Galleria Colonna in Rome

• Şirin Luisa Datli, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf / The Bibliotheca Hertziana — Max Planck Institute for Art History

Four large painted mirrors adorn the Galleria Colonna in Rome. Completed in 1670 by Carlo Maratta, Mario de' Fiori and Giovanni Stanchi, they reflect the Galleria’s candlelight, gilding, marble and numerous paintings, thus increasing the splendour of the gallery space. Two of them show relief vases with lush bouquets of flowers inside. Small putti animate the still life, as they also do in the other two painted mirrors, where they hold large flower garlands. In my paper, I want to point out an aspect of the painted mirrors, which adds to the (undoubted) effect of magnificence and the representative function. I do not see the mirrors solely as a means to better distribute light or to multiply the gallery's sumptuous décor, but in their function to initiate epistemological reflection. My argument is that the painted mirrors, which are neither just mirrors nor just images, are related to a new interest in the 17th century in the questions of seeing, perception, and cognition. By confronting the beholder with both a painted surface and the reflection of the mirror, the traditional pictorial concept of mimesis and perspective is challenged. Through this disruption of the pictorial illusion, the process of perception is revealed and the image as a medium of insight is put to the test. At the same time, doubts are sown: what can images actually demonstrate and can they be reliable? This paper shows how the painted mirrors in the Galleria Colonna pose questions regarding art theory and the status of visual representation and invite the beholder to reflect on those aspects through their specific medial qualities.

keywords: mirrors, art theory, 17^th century, epistemology

Specular Self-awareness: Between Gaze and Technique

• Renaud Gadoury, École normale supérieure / École des hautes études en sciences sociales

Far from the everyday object we now know, mirrors have long been one of the rarest and most expensive products available on the market. For centuries, Venice was the only center of production, enabling Venetian craftsmen to exert a decisive influence on pricing, which was kept at extremely high levels. Due to their prohibitive cost, mirrors remained for centuries the privilege of royal courts and the aristocracy. The 18th century marked a turning point in this respect. A conjunction of technical, economic and social factors led to a rapid increase in European mirror production, resulting in lower selling prices and a diversification of distribution networks. By the end of the century, mirrors had become an integral part of everyday life. The repercussions of their growing popularity were felt in fields as varied as astronomy, the cosmetics industry, literature, decorative arts, optics and philosophy. At once an object of scientific study, a literary motif, a perceptive tool and a social actor, the mirror is above all a reflexive device that catalyze a dialogue between consciousness and appearance, through which the two are brought together in a game of specular back-and-forth. This presentation seeks to explore intersections between the trajectory of the European mirror industry and that of pictorial self-consciousness, in order to investigate the hypothesis that the wider diffusion of mirrors, from the late 17^th to the early 19^th century, may have helped nourish a visual relationship to the self.

keywords: history of techniques, reflexivity, mirrors, self-consciousness, mediality