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One of the key pictorial developments of Renaissance art was a conceptualisation of painting as a mirror reflection of the visible world. The idea of painting as specular was argued in Renaissance art theory, demonstrated in art practice, and represented in painting itself. Both within the artist's workshop and within pictorial representation, the mirror-image became the instrument, the emblem, and the conceptual definition of what a painting was. In this volume, Genevieve Warwick brings a dual focus to the topic through an exploration of the early modern elision of the picture plane with the mirror – image. She considers the specular configuration of Renaissance painting from various thematic points of view to offer a fully interdisciplinary analysis of the mirror analogy that pervaded not only art theory and art-making, but also the larger cultural spheres of philosophy, letters, and scientific observation. Warwick's volume recasts our understanding of the inter-visual relationships between disciplines, and their consequences for a specular definition of Renaissance painting.
The conclusion summarises the main argument of the book: that the mirror-image, as an object and as a metaphor, was critical to the mimetic definition of painting that we recognise as the key pictorial development of Renaissance art. If perspective was painting’s means, the mirror was its exemplum. Tracing the conceptual elaboration of the reflective image, it concludes that the prolific representation of the inset-mirror motif within early modern painting was both the rebus and matrix of its own pictorial representation.
Opening with Leon Battista Alberti’s celebrated definition of painting as a reflection on the surface of the water according to the ancient myth of Narcissus, the introduction elucidates the analysis of the inset-mirror motif in Renaissance painting as a form of mise-en-abyme that was central to the conceptualisation and reception of early modern art.
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