Artists, natural philosophers, and architects in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century northern Europe regarded images and image-making as sources of knowledge. Diverse practitioners of art, architecture, and natural philosophy – from artists Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer to medical practitioner Walther Hermann Ryff and natural historian Conrad Gessner – used images to revive Vitruvius’s vision of architecture as both art and science, for instance in collaborating to complete the Strasbourg Astronomical Clock in 1574. Architectural ornament came to act as a model for visualizing nature’s regular forms and systems, playing a vital role in the revival of such Vitruvian interdisciplinarity. That process, in turn, prompted early modern architects and designers of architectural ornament to combine artistic and scientific techniques of visual research, a phenomenon exemplified in Dietterlin’s Architectura treatise.

Centred on the celebrated inset mirror of the Arnolfini double portrait, the chapter considers the rich evidence of fifteenth-century Flemish painting’s depictions of inset mirrors and the larger cultural histories that pertain to them, including the early Renaissance guilds that governed their artistic production. It highlights the relationship between painting and the heraldic arts of the period, comprising lustrous armorial metalwork alongside glass mirror manufacture, to suggest a broader context of reflective arts surrounding the representation of mirrors in painting.