R Taylor The Moral Mirror of Roman Art

Rabun Taylor, The Moral Mirror of Roman Art

Cambridge University Press

Cambridge, New York, 2008.

Published with the assistance of The Getty Foundation

288 pages

Isbn (ean13): 9780521866125

Présentation de l'éditeur:

This interdisciplinary study explores the meanings of mirrors and reflections in Roman art and society. When used as metaphors in Roman visual and literary discourses, mirrors had a strongly moral force, reflecting not random reality but rather a carefully filtered imagery with a didactic message. Focusing on examples found in mythical narrative, religious devotion, social interaction, and gender relations, Rabun Taylor demonstrates that reflections served as powerful symbols of personal change. Thus, in both art and literature, a reflection may be present during moments of a protagonist's inner or outer transformation.

Introduction:

QUEYNTE MIROURS

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, WHEN THE IDEA OF WRITING A BOOK ON THIS TOPIC first occurred to me, I fixed upon a puzzling little mystery. Why, in Roman art and story, is there virtually no such thing as a casual reflection? Instead, the phenomenon of reflectivity is clustered within a few special genres or myths, each of which imposes upon it a special and sometimes profound significance. On the other hand, many artistic genres – even those known for their traditions of naturalism – avoid the realistic rendering of liquid surfaces. To be sure, there are a few exceptions to this rule: a drinking goat on the painted Odyssey landscape in Rome poised symmetrically over its counter-image in the water comes immediately to mind, and lesser analogues can be found here and there. But for the most part, the vast expanses of water represented in Roman seascapes and riverine landscapes – though these are thick with boats, humans, gods, and marine creatures – transmit little more than random static. Reflection, it would seem, was too meaningful a phenomenon in received culture, and too valuable a discursive tool, to be left to chance.

On further consideration, I concluded that none of this should come as a surprise. The topic of reflection was heavily freighted with moral meaning and haunted by half-remembered ghosts of very ancient magico-religious beliefs. The whole point of avoiding reflectivity in the world of art was to safeguard its metaphorical potency in a few special preserves of meaning. When reflections or mirrors do appear in Roman art, they seem to convey – variably and inconstantly – a range of meanings corresponding to such words and phrases as femininity, beauty, eros, self-absorption, self-knowledge, divination, metanoia (change of heart), entrapment, liminality, spirit world, alterity, and death. These concepts can be divided roughly along two paths: toward the self, constructions of personhood, and one's place in society; or toward the Other and the strange other-world it inhabits.

In his essay “On Mirrors”, Umberto Eco concludes that a mirror image is not a sign of the thing it reflects.¹ It is merely a prosthesis, a tool for augmenting the ordinary human faculty of vision – useful enough in many circumstances, but devoid of any semantic content apart from what pertains to its referent. Although mirrors can transmit signs, he contends, they never engender them. However, it may appear in the mirror, a sign always exists apart from its reflection. Such is the clinical perspective of modernity, and even (arguably) of the ancient Stoics, whose semiotic theories Eco adduces to make his argument. But as Eco would be first to concede, things are quite different in the realm of human imagination and folk belief. Around the world, the disembodied verisimilitude of mirror images has led naturally to thoughts of the uncanny – of gods and ghosts, doppelgangers and monsters. If we could plunge through the textual surface of myth into the world of its protagonists, we would inhabit a realm where reflections were the antithesis of Eco's neutral organs of transmission.

In story and ritual around the world, reflections signify – and in many ways. Some act autonomously. Some have memories; they capture, preserve, and transmit truths. Other mirrors ensnare with falsehoods or ambiguities (for instance, the speculum fallax adduced by medieval moralists).² Others still can be oracular (“Mirror, mirror, on the wall…”). Mirrors may enclose a world unto themselves (Alice's adventures through the looking glass), or protect a reservoir of knowledge that the phenomenal world denies us: St. Paul's vision of heaven as “through a glass, darkly” is only the most famous of a long line of mystical speculations on the divine by way of the mirror metaphor.³ Reflected images may be seen as the captured spirits of the living or dead or as malicious demons intent on stealing the soul; hence Sir James Frazer's archetype of the primitive “mirror-soul.”⁴ A mirror can enclose one's double (for example, the Egyptian Ka),⁵ or be a channel to phenomena that would destroy the viewer if seen directly (Medusa's face, the Lady of Shalott's Camelot). It can even be the very antithesis of Eco's neutral tool of observation, denying entry of certain beings (e.g., vampires) into its own sphere. In the mid-second century C.E. Pausanias described a mirror, fixed to a wall of the temple of Demeter and Kore at Lycosura in Arcadia, that deleted all reflections of people milling about in front of it, and capturing only the images of the cult statues (8.37.7). It is hard to know whether he thought this was genuinely magical, or just a trick mirror of the sort devised by Hero of Alexandria to raise the image of a cult statue above its actual position.⁶ In either case, as Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux and Jean-Pierre Vernant have observed in their important study of reflection in antiquity, this mirror subverted the function of mirrors in general “by opening a breach in the scenery of ‘phenomena,' manifesting the invisible, revealing the divine, making it seen in the flash of a mysterious epiphany.”⁷

Whereas Eco focuses on the “content” of mirrors that are mere passive agents to observation in the phenomenal world, in works of the imagination the mirrors are themselves content; and so they and the images they contain are under no such constraints. Reflection as a cosmos of the world beyond emerges in many mythologies.⁸ Storytellers and mythmakers over the ages, influenced as much by magic and folklore as by the intellectual currents of classical antiquity, could not resist the allure of the looking glass, particularly if it was attached to a famous king or savant. The Egyptian alchemist Zosimus, writing in the third or fourth century C.E., speaks of a mirror of electrum commissioned by Alexander the Great in which any viewer could see his own future. One perceived in its orb not just images, but the perfect divine spirit itself, in whose sway everything resides up to the instant of our death.⁹ According to Ibn al-Zubayr, God gave Adam a magical mirror that allowed its owner to see anything on earth. This was not merely a fiction of the distant past, he reports, for it had come down, by way of King Solomon, to the Umayyad dynasty and ultimately the Abbasid treasuries closer to his own time.¹⁰ In Spenser's The Faerie Queene Merlin possessed a “wondrous myrrhour” (or a crystal ball, an invention of the poet's day). “It vertue had, to shew in perfect sight,/ What ever thing was in the world contaynd,/ Betwixt the lowest earth and heavens might,/ So that it to the looker appertaynd” (3.2.19).¹¹ Chaucer's squire tells of a strange knight “upon a steede of bras,/ and in his hand a brood mirour of glas” which allegedly could impart full knowledge of one's foes and lovers. Its powers incite speculation among the skeptics in his audience:

And somme of hem wondred on the mirour
That born was up into the maister tour,
Hou men myghte in it swiche thynges se.
Another answerde and seyde it myghte wel be
Naturelly, by composiciouns
Of anglis and of slye reflexiouns,
And seyden that in Rome was swich oon.
They speken of Alocen, and Vitulon,¹²
And Aristotle, that writen in hir lyves
Of queynte mirours and of perspectives,
As knowen they that han hir bookes herd (Canterbury Tales 5.225–35).

Living at a time when magic and science coexisted comfortably, medieval and Renaissance writers often ascribed the lore of magic mirrors to great thinkers of the past. Aristotle and Alhazen are likely candidates for Chaucer; both were men of science and authorities on optics, but their remoteness in time and the difficulty of their texts cast a haze of legend over their mechanical theories. Spenser compares his glass to the legendary creations of King Ptolemy II, whose reputation for wizardry emerged from the nonpareil feat of his architects in Alexandria: the Pharos lighthouse, itself perceived as a tour de force of optical engineering.

In the post-Enlightenment world, surrounded by reflections of every kind, we are apt to dismiss the mirror as a passive medium unselectively reflecting anything and everything transmissible by light. But even we, who have reached a cultural “mirror stage” brought on by scientific consensus and universal familiarity with casual reflection, must admit that certain aspects of reflection remain uncanny, even unnerving. Consider the absolute reversal of left and right produced by a single planar mirror. My body extends into three dimensions. I imagine these dimensions to correspond to three bipolar axes extending out from my center: front-back, top-bottom, left-right. From the cognitive perspective of the seeing organism, one would expect each of these oppositions to be undifferentiated and interchangeable, like the x–y–z axes in mathematics; but surprisingly, this is not the case. When I look at myself frontally in a mirror on the wall, I am aware of reversals along two, but not all three, of these axes. My image is reversed from front to back and left to right – but not from top to bottom. If I stand on top of a mirror and look down into it, or hold it directly above my head, the configuration changes. Now the image is inverted vertically and laterally, but not from front to back. The beginnings of a pattern seem to emerge. There are three axes. Both axes I have tested suggest a rotating ratio of 2:1: two dimensions inverted, one not. So there should be a third mirror position from which front–back and top–bottom will be inverted – but not left–right. Yet try as I might, I can find no such position.¹³ In a single mirror, the left–right reversal is absolute, but the others are not.

Less puzzling, but still not intuitive, is the nature of reflection in a world without metals. Any flat, highly glossy nonmetallic surface, including water, is completely reflective only at very oblique angles. On water and on polished stone walls, we easily and clearly make out the reflection of things that lie distant from us but only slightly removed from the plane of the surface – objects that glance at a slight angle off the surface on their way to the eye. But direct, perpendicular reflection is at best partial, and at worst unintelligible, for it contends with the interference of the medium's nonreflective properties, such as transparency (water) or color and texture (ice or stone). From underwater, there are no partial reflections on the surface whatever. A broad cone of nonreflectivity extends up from the eye to the surface. Within its boundaries there is no coherent reflection, only the transitory scribbles generated by turbulence on the surface. Beyond the cone's boundaries the surface is transformed into a completely silvered mirror, like the rippling surface of mercury (again, mitigated by some dappling generated by turbulence). A striking conclusion, then: in the prehistory of reflectivity, no visual image of the self was ever fully realized. A glossy surface was far more effective at capturing the Other (which lay at some distance) than at constructing the self.

And so we must suppress our Lacanian inclination to put self-construction at the center of every mirror. The interest in remotest antiquity was surely directed toward the tendency of reflections to create another world, not a confronting face. The earliest human encounters with reflections were on water, and water was always a numinous realm. The fact that images on liquids are not absolute reflections, but are partially transparent, and that the region beneath their surface is distorted, refracted, and in every way alien to our own, must have influenced ancient thinking about all mirrors: they are not just distinct boundaries, but receptacles; they contain an alternate reality.¹⁴ The infinitude of the world beyond seems an apt metaphor for death and its attendant spirit world.

Roman culture was well advanced into the “mirror stage.” Far removed from Neolithic life, Romans came as close as any ancient people to taking mirrors for granted. They were not spooked by the ordinary and predictable reflections on the metallic surfaces they encountered in their everyday lives. But they did inherit longstanding traditions of myth and religious belief. For example, writing in the late second century C.E., Apollodorus of Athens articulates a common perception of antiquity when he compares Homer's eidola, the flitting shades of dreams and the dead, to waterborne reflections.¹⁵ More importantly, Romans understood the rich potential of the mirror for metaphor. Like the shadow, the mirror image is an incorporeal replica of a body whose movements it dutifully mimics; it seems only reasonable that both phenomena, from time immemorial, should have been interpreted as surrogates of the soul.¹⁶ But the reflection, unlike the shadow, appears only within a suitable medium that frames it, and presents the naturalistic illusion of depth. This surrogate comes with its own world.

There was, of course, another approach to reflectivity in antiquity, informed by the rationalism of scientific inquiry. Ancient optics in general, and catoptrics (the science of mirrors) in particular, were never conceived as phenomena entirely independent of cognition.¹⁷ From the perspective of Greek theory, especially as propounded by Ptolemy, sight is “nothing but that which makes seeing, and thus first and primordially a gaze. So the reification, so curious to us, of this gaze – simultaneously a thing among things and sensation among things sensible – may be explained as a quasi-organ projected geometrically out from our bodies.”¹⁸ A robust corpus of scientific and philosophical discussions of mirrors survives from antiquity, including discourses on catoptrics attributed to Euclid, Ptolemy, and Hero of Alexandria as well as an atomistic treatment of reflection by Lucretius.¹⁹ Reflectivity was understood as a derivative of optical mechanics, and was thus subsumed under the larger question of how we see.²⁰ Beginning with the Presocratics, various scientific theories of vision emerged, most of them favoring the eye either as an active agent of vision, emitting rays of illumination, or as a receptor of emanations from the object. Writing in the mid-first century C.E., Seneca recognized two dominant theories of catoptrics. One was an extension of atomistic optical theory, which regarded the eye as the passive receptor of eidola (“images” or “shadows”) issuing from the seen objects. Here the mirror was perceived as an agent not in duplicating the image, but in changing its path. The other theory, closer to Seneca's own Stoicism, regarded a mirror as a deflector of rays emanating from the eye.²¹ In both cases, then, the mirror merely took the impact of the visual act and redirected it; the mirror did not initiate the act or manipulate the content of the image, except to frame it. As such, it was essentially passive.

MIRRORS AS METAPHOR IN ANTIQUITY

But mirrors are paradoxical; opposites reside in them. Self and the Other, same and different, true and false, positive and negative, surface and depth – these and other oppositions inhere in the interplay of human cognition and real mirrors.²² So too do active and passive; for although most would regard a mirror as optically passive, it is actively involved in a cognitive event: it splits off the subject from the object, arousing sensibilities in the act of self-regard that might not otherwise come to pass.²³ Hence the interesting evolution of the Greek word klan, “ ,” “shatter,” to denote deflection or reflection.²⁴ It is this very real capacity for mirrors to participate in a psychological phenomenon, I believe, that helped to preserve their symbolic complexity in spite of the agnostic advances of Greek science.

In the ancient vernacular imagination, grounded in myth and preserved particularly in the visual tradition, a powerful attitude persisted that the metaphorical mirror of art and story is a kind of machine – a semiautonomous organ of conversion. When a mirror transmits reality on the rebound, it does so as a cognitive filter. The background noise of chaotic reality is stripped away, and the specular image, sometimes baneful, sometimes beneficial, returns with concentrated force – or diminished force, if the original phenomenon, such as Medusa's face or the glory of God,²⁵ is too intense to be seen. By subtracting from the object, mirrors augment the subject – though not necessarily in a positive or improving way. So when Aeschylus and Alcaeus claim that wine is the mirror of the soul, they are ascribing to the mirror an editorial faculty.²⁶ What you see reflected is essence, truer and more concentrated than the original: in vino veritas implies a corollary, sine vino vanitas. The action of a mirror does not end at the reflection. It is carried back to the viewer and changes him (Plato Phaedr. 255b–d). When I “reflect” or “speculate” on an object of thought I am projecting upon it an idea. The idea rebounds, and I receive it and process it in a clarified, concentrated form. The mirror therefore is not a strictly optical, or objective, device; it processes the moral, psychological, and intellectual faculties of the subject.²⁷

It is the mirror as I have just characterized it – active, semiautonomous – that constitutes the subject of this book. The principles of the active mirror, I believe, can be laid out as a series of simple mnemonic associations:

The mirror is magical. Folklorists and anthropologists have long known that reflections, probably because of their timeless presence on the surface of water (and thus of the nether world), have been used as implements of magic and symbols for magical phenomena. The mirror as soul-catcher, as portal to the dead, as an oracular window on the future – all of these elemental attributions are present, or at least vestigial, in Roman culture. With some notable exceptions (Pliny the Elder's encyclopedic Natural History, for example, or Artemidorus' The Interpretation of Dreams), ideas of this kind are not accorded much attention in the literature of the educated Roman elite; but they are embedded in ancient folk belief, leaving many traces in art, myth, and ritual.

The mirror is metamorphic. There is often a fascinating correlation between a reflective act (i.e., the perception of a reflection in art, story, or ritual) and personal transformation. Sometimes the change is a bodily metamorphosis driven by external forces (the youth Actaeon, for example, who sees himself as a dying stag reflected in the water), but even more interesting are shifts in personal identity. Because the mirror is a gendered thing, reflections may be featured in stories of gender ambivalence and vacillation. The metamorphosis may be helpful (e.g., to Achilles on Skyros) or baneful (to Narcissus). In the ritual sphere, it may accompany an altered state of mind (as in the cult of Dionysus), or even apotheosis (as in the rebirth of Dionysus himself). Particularly in literature and narrative, the represented mirror in Greco-Roman art and literature can be understood as a permeable, absorbent medium that offers entry into another world or another state of being. As such it is a threshold; and like all magical thresholds it filters the person in transit. This filtering effect may be cleansing or it may be drastically reductive. The object-self returns to the subject only if the mirror is truly reflexive; that is, if the beholder sees him- or herself. In Roman art, the mirror (reflexive or not) is often the vertex of an open triangle in which the viewer (i.e., you or I) spies the reflection. This has the effect of forcing the viewer into the subjectivity of the protagonist.

The mirror is metaphorical. Anything that is an agent in a phenomenon may eventually become a metaphor of it, the sign vehicle of its own function. In essence the Roman mirror becomes, among other things, a signifier of metamorphosis – whether it be the banality of blossoming beauty, the pathos of loss, or the secret ways of achieving ecstasy in mystery cults.

The mirror is magnetic. Reflection in ancient art is not a neutral, value-free simulation of reality; it is an autonomous, powerfully captivating force. The mirror creates a protagonist. Whoever is reflected therein, explicitly or implicitly, is meant to be the principal object of the viewer's attention. Together with its referent (i.e., the thing mirrored), the represented mirror tends to form an asymmetrical diptych in which the reflection pulls inexorably at the viewer and dominates the referent – which may also be subject to its pull. It does not necessarily represent the most psychologically satisfying state (as witness the mirror images of Thetis or the dying Persian in chapter 4), but it has the force of inevitability. This imbalance in favor of the image is undoubtedly tied to the ancient and enduring mythology of the double – an entity that, “free from all inhibition and molded to escape various frustrations, wields so much energy that it eclipses its model and absorbs its vitality.”²⁸

The mirror is moral. I return to the question I began with. There are no casual reflections in Roman art, I think, because reflection more than almost any other visual phenomenon was bound up with necessity. It is moral because it reveals what must be. Its framing of the referent, its status as a magnet of the gaze and a concentrator of meaning, privileges it. Here, the word moral is meant to encompass both the positive and the negative. Reflections may provide assistance in the accomplishment of a desirable or necessary task, the nature of which has almost infinite permutations. Socrates and Seneca extol the mirror as a path to self-knowledge; it is also used this way in myth. Most commonly, it is the channel by which femininity defines itself and masculinity improves itself – which, when approached in the prescribed way, reinforces the worth of its user. But a mirror may too be a dangerous and even an insidious thing; its associations with black magic have survived to this day. In the possession of a man it can lead him to the ruinous state (or so Roman moralists assessed it) of self-absorption. Even a virtuous woman must beware of its corrupting powers.

When used as a metaphor, the Roman mirror is always in some sense moral. Thus the term “moral mirror,” as it is used in this book, refers to the mirror as a coded device, whether in art or literature, and not just an artefact in every- day life.

REFLECTIONS IN REAL LIFE

How did Romans interact with reflection in everyday life? Certainly there were fewer opportunities to encounter casual reflections in antiquity than we have today, except as vague, fugitive shadows. Vitruvius observes that stucco can be polished to a mirror surface (7.3.11). Polished stone wall revetment became common in public buildings in the Julio-Claudian era, but its reflective properties were relatively feeble, despite Suetonius' picturesque report that the emperor Domitian insisted on polished surfaces throughout his palace so that he could spy assassins approaching from behind (Dom. 14.4). On the other hand, in the mid-first century C.E. Seneca complained that even in quite ordinary bathing establishments the walls were “resplendent with large and costly mirrors” (Ep. 86.6, my transl.), probably of the full-length kind he so deplored in the homes of the rich. He also attested to the newfangled trend of installing large glass windows in baths (Ep. 86.4, 8; 90.25), which would have had some limited reflective value. We may reasonably surmise that almost everyone owned, or had access to, some kind of hand mirror for personal grooming.

Bronze mirrors, once popular among the elite in the Aegean of the palatial period, disappeared from the Greek record thereafter before emerging in the early sixth century B.C.E. They came to Italy at about the same time.²⁹ Personal mirrors were ubiquitous in the Roman world; extant examples surely number in the thousands. They are far too scattered, and too poorly cataloged, to be studied as a body, but fortunately there are enough dedicated collections and specialized publications to allow some general assessments of their history, types, and distribution.³⁰ Roman mirrors were made of silver, bronze (itself often silvered or tinned), or glass with metallic backing. From the first century B.C.E., simple rectangular and disk mirrors of bronze, without handles of any kind, seem to have enjoyed widespread popularity.³¹ With the invention of transparent glass in Syria at the beginning of the first century B.C.E., small glass mirrors with a variety of metallic backings, usually set into frames of contrasting materials, also became a widespread accessory in Roman households.³² Often these were much smaller (they could have a diameter as tiny as 2.5 cm), and so in order to be useful their surfaces were made convex. Natural convexity was achieved by blowing a globe of glass and coating its interior with molten lead or some other metal, and then carefully sectioning the globe and working its segments into disks.³³

Humble mirrors of this kind almost never appear in Roman art. The dignity of representation is granted only to the more prestigious forms, which fall into a few general categories. First and foremost, the classic grip mirror: a disk of silver, bronze, or silvered bronze, usually slightly smaller than a face, to which is attached a separate upright handle at the bottom.³⁴ Its surface may be flat or even concave, but much more commonly it is slightly convex. The backs of Roman grip mirrors rarely carry figural decoration but often are incised with concentric circles; the rim may be smooth or decorated with perforations or scalloping (Fig. 1). Two other common “prestige” types are the lid mirror and the box mirror.³⁵ The lid mirror, derived from a more elaborate Hellenistic prototype, consists of a thin disk and a separate lid that fits snugly over it. It seems to have been a specialty of workshops in southern Gaul.

The term box mirror (or mirror box) refers loosely to a number of subtypes. One consists of a wafer-thin reflective disk inserted into a separately made circular metal box with a removable lid. On a popular Gallic type, both sides of the box are decorated with Neronian coins from the imperial mint in Lugdunum. The classic hinged subtype (the Klappspiegel ), looking much like a modern compact, was a Greek invention beloved also of Etruscan aristocratic women from the third to the first century B.C.E. – particularly those of Volterra, whose sculptural portraits reclining atop cinerary urns often included it as an attribute.³⁶ Circular or square, the mirror's frame and lid could be made of bronze, wood, or bone. Many charming late-Republican or early-Imperial statuettes from Myrina in Asia Minor (Fig. 2) portray a little Eros hoisting an oversize circular mirror of this type. One of the most familiar scenes in all of Roman art features a rectangular version. This is the hairdressing episode from the Mysteries Frieze at Pompeii, in which (again) the implement is borne by an Eros (Fig. 3). It is uncertain whether this is a hinged model, or the rarer sliding variety, of which two examples in bone have been preserved at Taranto (Fig. 4).

Sommaire:

List of Figures page ix

Acknowledgments xiii
INTRODUCTION 1
Queynte Mirours 1
Mirrors as Metaphor in Antiquity 6
Reflections in Real Life 9
The Literature 14
The Roman Viewer 17 1 THE TEACHING MIRROR 19
The Mirror and Masculinity 19
Minerva, Marsyas, and Gendered Standards of Performance 26
Active Passivity: The Performative Mirror of Woman 32
The Mirror of Venus 39
The Dove and the Partridge 47 2 MIRRORS MORTAL AND MORBID: NARCISSUS AND HERMAPHRODITUS 56
Narcissus in Roman Literature 56
Narcissus in Roman Art 64
Pathological Reflexivity 1: The Allure of the Feminine Reflection 71
Pathological Reflexivity 2: Hermaphroditus 77
Involving the Viewer: Reflections on Actaeon 86
Conclusion 88 3 THE MIRROR OF DIONYSUS 90
Amphibious Dionysus 94
The Orphic Zagreus 95
Mechanisms of Transformation 1: An Apulian Trend 99
Mechanisms of Transformation 2: Other Italian Evidence 108
Lamination: Pre-Roman Precedents 121
The Mirror and the Mask 126
Conclusion 134 4 THE MIRRORING SHIELD OF ACHILLES 137
The Shield of Lamachos 139
The Alexander Mosaic 140
Achilles on Skyros 143
Thetis 152
Boscoreale 158
“Look Behind You”: The Relamination of the Shield-Mirror 165
Conclusion 167 5 THE MIRRORING SHIELD OF PERSEUS 169
Freud 172
Perseus, Andromeda, and the Mirror 173
The Reflexive Evil Eye: Was Medusa a Victim of Her Own Gaze? 182
Two Kinds of Invisibility 188
The Mask on the Shield 193 6 CONCLUSION 197
APPENDIX: MEDUSA AND THE EVIL EYE 203 Notes 207 Bibliography 241 Index 259

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