This chapter examines the optical lenses and reflectors of Renaissance optical science, as used in the telescope and the microscope, and their uses as instruments of visual documentation of scientific observation, from stars to microbes. It also studies the use of mirrors and lenses in the production of illusionistic imagery, including anamorphic distensions, from a wealth of trick imagery to optical perspective cabinets to major works such as Holbein’s Ambassadors.

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.

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.

This chapter studies the painted representation of mirror reflections and the female nude in High Renaissance art, from Giorgione’s bella donna at her toilet to the Rokeby Venus. Situating this imagery within the cultural contexts of betrothal and marriage, it highlights the allegorical relationship between the female nude and the mirror reflection as the conjoined pictorial emblems of Renaissance art’s beauty.

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.

Beginning with the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the chapter maps the history of Renaissance glass mirror-making from the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon to seventeenth-century Paris. It also offers a typology of Renaissance mirror types across the decorative arts and scientific instruments of the period. Further, it considers the idea of the mirror as an agent of light, reflection, and illusion across a range of cultural domains, comprising folklore, myth, and literature.

This chapter considers the early modern artist’s use of mirrors, along with other visual aids, in both art theory and artistic practice, to argue that the mirror was a critical instrument of artistic mimesis. The mirror reflection became an acknowledged method of Renaissance artistic training because it united theory with practice. This is manifest above all in the efflorescence of the self-portrait c. 1500, then identified by the instrument of its making, as a ‘portrait made by a mirror’. The chapter concludes with Velazquez’ Las Meninas as the defining early modern mirror-image, comprising both the self-portrait and the inset mirror motif.