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:
Thisinterdisciplinary study explores the meanings of mirrors andreflections in Roman art and society. When used as metaphors in Romanvisual and literary discourses, mirrors had a strongly moral force,reflecting not random reality but rather a carefully filtered imagerywith a didactic message. Focusing on examples found in mythicalnarrative, religious devotion, social interaction, and genderrelations, Rabun Taylor demonstrates that reflections served aspowerful symbols of personal change. Thus, in both art and literature,a reflection may be present during moments of a protagonist's inner orouter transformation.
Introduction:
QUEYNTE MIROURS
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, WHEN THE IDEA OF WRITING A BOOK ON THIS TOPICfirst occurred to me, I fixed upon a puzzling little mystery. Why, inRoman art and story, is there virtually no such thing as a casualreflection? Instead, the phenomenon of reflectivity is clustered withina few special genres or myths, each of which imposes upon it a specialand sometimes profound significance. On the other hand, many artisticgenres – even those known for their traditions of naturalism – avoidthe realistic rendering of liquid surfaces. To be sure, there are a fewexceptions to this rule: a drinking goat on the painted Odysseylandscape in Rome poised symmetrically over its counter-image in thewater comes immediately to mind, and lesser analogues can be found hereand there. But for the most part, the vast expanses of waterrepresented in Roman seascapes and riverine landscapes – though theseare thick with boats, humans, gods, and marine creatures – transmitlittle more than random static. Reflection, it would seem, was toomeaningful a phenomenon in received culture, and too valuable adiscursive tool, to be left to chance.
On further consideration, I concluded that noneof this should come as a surprise. The topic of reflection was heavilyfreighted with moral meaning and haunted by half-remembered ghosts ofvery ancient magico-religious beliefs. The whole point of avoidingreflectivity in the world of art was to safeguard its metaphoricalpotency in a few special preserves of meaning. When reflections ormirrors do appear in Roman art, they seem to convey – variably andinconstantly – a range of meanings corresponding to such words andphrases as femininity, beauty, eros, self-absorption, self-knowledge,divination, metanoia (change of heart), entrapment, liminality,spirit world, alterity, and death. These concepts can be dividedroughly along two paths: toward the self, constructions of personhood,and one's place in society; or toward the Other and the strangeother-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 – usefulenough in many circumstances, but devoid of any semantic content apartfrom what pertains to its referent. Although mirrors can transmitsigns, he contends, they never engender them. However, it may appear inthe mirror, a sign always exists apart from its reflection. Such is theclinical perspective of modernity, and even (arguably) of the ancientStoics, whose semiotic theories Eco adduces to make his argument. Butas Eco would be first to concede, things are quite different in therealm of human imagination and folk belief. Around the world, thedisembodied verisimilitude of mirror images has led naturally tothoughts of the uncanny – of gods and ghosts, doppelgangers andmonsters. If we could plunge through the textual surface of myth intothe world of its protagonists, we would inhabit a realm wherereflections were the antithesis of Eco's neutral organs of transmission.
In story and ritual around the world, reflectionssignify – and in many ways. Some act autonomously. Some have memories;they capture, preserve, and transmit truths. Other mirrors ensnare withfalsehoods or ambiguities (for instance, the speculum fallax adduced by medieval moralists).2Others still can be oracular (“Mirror, mirror, on the wall…”). Mirrorsmay enclose a world unto themselves (Alice's adventures through thelooking glass), or protect a reservoir of knowledge that the phenomenalworld denies us: St. Paul's vision of heaven as “through a glass,darkly” is only the most famous of a long line of mystical speculationson the divine by way of the mirror metaphor.3Reflected images may be seen as the captured spirits of the living ordead or as malicious demons intent on stealing the soul; hence SirJames Frazer's archetype of the primitive “mirror-soul.”4 A mirror can enclose one's double (for example, the Egyptian Ka),5or be a channel to phenomena that would destroy the viewer if seendirectly (Medusa's face, the Lady of Shalott's Camelot). It can even bethe very antithesis of Eco's neutral tool of observation, denying entryof certain beings (e.g., vampires) into its own sphere. In themid-second century C.E. Pausanias described a mirror,fixed to a wall of the temple of Demeter and Kore at Lycosura inArcadia, that deleted all reflections of people milling about in frontof it, and capturing only the images of the cult statues (8.37.7). Itis hard to know whether he thought this was genuinely magical, or justa trick mirror of the sort devised by Hero of Alexandria to raise theimage of a cult statue above its actual position.6In either case, as Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux and Jean-Pierre Vernanthave observed in their important study of reflection in antiquity, thismirror subverted the function of mirrors in general “by opening abreach in the scenery of ‘phenomena,' manifesting the invisible,revealing the divine, making it seen in the flash of a mysteriousepiphany.”7
Whereas Eco focuses on the “content” of mirrorsthat are mere passive agents to observation in the phenomenal world, inworks of the imagination the mirrors are themselves content; and sothey and the images they contain are under no such constraints.Reflection as a cosmos of the world beyond emerges in many mythologies.8Storytellers and mythmakers over the ages, influenced as much by magicand folklore as by the intellectual currents of classical antiquity,could not resist the allure of the looking glass, particularly if itwas attached to a famous king or savant. The Egyptian alchemistZosimus, writing in the third or fourth century C.E.,speaks of a mirror of electrum commissioned by Alexander the Great inwhich any viewer could see his own future. One perceived in its orb notjust images, but the perfect divine spirit itself, in whose swayeverything resides up to the instant of our death.9According to Ibn al-Zubayr, God gave Adam a magical mirror that allowedits owner to see anything on earth. This was not merely a fiction ofthe distant past, he reports, for it had come down, by way of KingSolomon, to the Umayyad dynasty and ultimately the Abbasid treasuriescloser to his own time.10 In Spenser's The Faerie QueeneMerlin possessed a “wondrous myrrhour” (or a crystal ball, an inventionof the poet's day). “It vertue had, to shew in perfect sight,/ Whatever thing was in the world contaynd,/ Betwixt the lowest earth andheavens might,/ So that it to the looker appertaynd” (3.2.19).11Chaucer's squire tells of a strange knight “upon a steede of bras,/ andin his hand a brood mirour of glas” which allegedly could impart fullknowledge of one's foes and lovers. Its powers incite speculation amongthe 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 coexistedcomfortably, medieval and Renaissance writers often ascribed the loreof magic mirrors to great thinkers of the past. Aristotle and Alhazenare likely candidates for Chaucer; both were men of science andauthorities on optics, but their remoteness in time and the difficultyof their texts cast a haze of legend over their mechanical theories.Spenser compares his glass to the legendary creations of King PtolemyII, whose reputation for wizardry emerged from the nonpareil feat ofhis architects in Alexandria: the Pharos lighthouse, itself perceivedas a tour de force of optical engineering.
In the post-Enlightenment world, surrounded byreflections of every kind, we are apt to dismiss the mirror as apassive medium unselectively reflecting anything and everythingtransmissible by light. But even we, who have reached a cultural“mirror stage” brought on by scientific consensus and universalfamiliarity with casual reflection, must admit that certain aspects ofreflection remain uncanny, even unnerving. Consider the absolutereversal of left and right produced by a single planar mirror. My bodyextends into three dimensions. I imagine these dimensions to correspondto three bipolar axes extending out from my center: front-back,top-bottom, left-right. From the cognitive perspective of the seeingorganism, one would expect each of these oppositions to beundifferentiated and interchangeable, like the x–y–zaxes in mathematics; but surprisingly, this is not the case. When Ilook at myself frontally in a mirror on the wall, I am aware ofreversals along two, but not all three, of these axes. My image isreversed from front to back and left to right – but not from top tobottom. If I stand on top of a mirror and look down into it, or hold itdirectly above my head, the configuration changes. Now the image isinverted vertically and laterally, but not from front to back. Thebeginnings of a pattern seem to emerge. There are three axes. Both axesI have tested suggest a rotating ratio of 2:1: two dimensions inverted,one not. So there should be a third mirror position from whichfront–back and top–bottom will be inverted – but not left–right. Yettry 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 nonmetallicsurface, including water, is completely reflective only at very obliqueangles. On water and on polished stone walls, we easily and clearlymake out the reflection of things that lie distant from us but onlyslightly removed from the plane of the surface – objects that glance ata slight angle off the surface on their way to the eye. But direct,perpendicular reflection is at best partial, and at worstunintelligible, for it contends with the interference of the medium'snonreflective properties, such as transparency (water) or color andtexture (ice or stone). From underwater, there are no partialreflections on the surface whatever. A broad cone of nonreflectivityextends up from the eye to the surface. Within its boundaries there isno coherent reflection, only the transitory scribbles generated byturbulence on the surface. Beyond the cone's boundaries the surface istransformed into a completely silvered mirror, like the ripplingsurface of mercury (again, mitigated by some dappling generated byturbulence). A striking conclusion, then: in the prehistory ofreflectivity, no visual image of the self was ever fully realized. Aglossy surface was far more effective at capturing the Other (which layat some distance) than at constructing the self.
And so we must suppress our Lacanian inclinationto put self-construction at the center of every mirror. The interest inremotest antiquity was surely directed toward the tendency ofreflections to create another world, not a confronting face. Theearliest human encounters with reflections were on water, and water wasalways a numinous realm. The fact that images on liquids are notabsolute reflections, but are partially transparent, and that theregion beneath their surface is distorted, refracted, and in every wayalien to our own, must have influenced ancient thinking about allmirrors: they are not just distinct boundaries, but receptacles; theycontain 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 “mirrorstage.” Far removed from Neolithic life, Romans came as close as anyancient people to taking mirrors for granted. They were not spooked bythe ordinary and predictable reflections on the metallic surfaces theyencountered in their everyday lives. But they did inherit longstandingtraditions of myth and religious belief. For example, writing in thelate 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.15More importantly, Romans understood the rich potential of the mirrorfor metaphor. Like the shadow, the mirror image is an incorporealreplica of a body whose movements it dutifully mimics; it seems onlyreasonable that both phenomena, from time immemorial, should have beeninterpreted as surrogates of the soul.16But the reflection, unlike the shadow, appears only within a suitablemedium that frames it, and presents the naturalistic illusion of depth.This surrogate comes with its own world.
There was, of course, another approach toreflectivity in antiquity, informed by the rationalism of scientificinquiry. Ancient optics in general, and catoptrics (the science ofmirrors) in particular, were never conceived as phenomena entirelyindependent 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 athing among things and sensation among things sensible – may beexplained as a quasi-organ projected geometrically out from our bodies.”18A robust corpus of scientific and philosophical discussions of mirrorssurvives from antiquity, including discourses on catoptrics attributedto Euclid, Ptolemy, and Hero of Alexandria as well as an atomistictreatment of reflection by Lucretius.19Reflectivity was understood as a derivative of optical mechanics, andwas thus subsumed under the larger question of how we see.20Beginning with the Presocratics, various scientific theories of visionemerged, most of them favoring the eye either as an active agent ofvision, emitting rays of illumination, or as a receptor of emanationsfrom the object. Writing in the mid-first century C.E.,Seneca recognized two dominant theories of catoptrics. One was anextension of atomistic optical theory, which regarded the eye as thepassive receptor of eidola (“images” or “shadows”) issuing fromthe seen objects. Here the mirror was perceived as an agent not induplicating the image, but in changing its path. The other theory,closer to Seneca's own Stoicism, regarded a mirror as a deflector ofrays emanating from the eye.21 Inboth cases, then, the mirror merely took the impact of the visual actand redirected it; the mirror did not initiate the act or manipulatethe content of the image, except to frame it. As such, it wasessentially passive.
MIRRORS AS METAPHOR IN ANTIQUITY
But mirrors are paradoxical; opposites reside inthem. Self and the Other, same and different, true and false, positiveand negative, surface and depth – these and other oppositions inhere inthe interplay of human cognition and real mirrors.22So too do active and passive; for although most would regard a mirroras optically passive, it is actively involved in a cognitive event: itsplits off the subject from the object, arousing sensibilities in theact 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.24It is this very real capacity for mirrors to participate in apsychological phenomenon, I believe, that helped to preserve theirsymbolic complexity in spite of the agnostic advances of Greek science.
In the ancient vernacular imagination, groundedin myth and preserved particularly in the visual tradition, a powerfulattitude persisted that the metaphorical mirror of art and story is akind of machine – a semiautonomous organ of conversion. When amirror transmits reality on the rebound, it does so as a cognitivefilter. The background noise of chaotic reality is stripped away, andthe specular image, sometimes baneful, sometimes beneficial, returnswith concentrated force – or diminished force, if the originalphenomenon, such as Medusa's face or the glory of God,25is too intense to be seen. By subtracting from the object, mirrorsaugment the subject – though not necessarily in a positive or improvingway. So when Aeschylus and Alcaeus claim that wine is the mirror of thesoul, 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 amprojecting upon it an idea. The idea rebounds, and I receive it andprocess it in a clarified, concentrated form. The mirror therefore isnot 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 activemirror, I believe, can be laid out as a series of simple mnemonicassociations:
The mirror is magical. Folklorists andanthropologists have long known that reflections, probably because oftheir timeless presence on the surface of water (and thus of the netherworld), have been used as implements of magic and symbols for magicalphenomena. The mirror as soul-catcher, as portal to the dead, as anoracular window on the future – all of these elemental attributions arepresent, or at least vestigial, in Roman culture. With some notableexceptions (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 ofthe 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 oftena fascinating correlation between a reflective act (i.e., theperception of a reflection in art, story, or ritual) and personaltransformation. Sometimes the change is a bodily metamorphosis drivenby external forces (the youth Actaeon, for example, who sees himself asa dying stag reflected in the water), but even more interesting areshifts in personal identity. Because the mirror is a gendered thing,reflections may be featured in stories of gender ambivalence andvacillation. The metamorphosis may be helpful (e.g., to Achilles onSkyros) or baneful (to Narcissus). In the ritual sphere, it mayaccompany an altered state of mind (as in the cult of Dionysus), oreven apotheosis (as in the rebirth of Dionysus himself). Particularlyin literature and narrative, the represented mirror in Greco-Roman artand literature can be understood as a permeable, absorbent medium thatoffers entry into another world or another state of being. As such itis a threshold; and like all magical thresholds it filters the personin transit. This filtering effect may be cleansing or it may bedrastically reductive. The object-self returns to the subject only ifthe mirror is truly reflexive; that is, if the beholder sees him- orherself. In Roman art, the mirror (reflexive or not) is often thevertex of an open triangle in which the viewer (i.e., you or I) spiesthe reflection. This has the effect of forcing the viewer into thesubjectivity of the protagonist.
The mirror is metaphorical. Anything that is an agent in a phenomenon may eventually become a metaphorof it, the sign vehicle of its own function. In essence the Romanmirror becomes, among other things, a signifier of metamorphosis –whether it be the banality of blossoming beauty, the pathos of loss, orthe secret ways of achieving ecstasy in mystery cults.
The mirror is magnetic. Reflection inancient art is not a neutral, value-free simulation of reality; it isan autonomous, powerfully captivating force. The mirror creates aprotagonist. Whoever is reflected therein, explicitly or implicitly, ismeant to be the principal object of the viewer's attention. Togetherwith its referent (i.e., the thing mirrored), the represented mirrortends to form an asymmetrical diptych in which the reflection pullsinexorably at the viewer and dominates the referent – which may also besubject to its pull. It does not necessarily represent the mostpsychologically satisfying state (as witness the mirror images ofThetis or the dying Persian in chapter 4), but it has the force ofinevitability. This imbalance in favor of the image is undoubtedly tiedto 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 itsvitality.”28
The mirror is moral. I return to thequestion I began with. There are no casual reflections in Roman art, Ithink, because reflection more than almost any other visual phenomenonwas bound up with necessity. It is moral because it reveals what mustbe. Its framing of the referent, its status as a magnet of the gaze anda concentrator of meaning, privileges it. Here, the word moralis meant to encompass both the positive and the negative. Reflectionsmay provide assistance in the accomplishment of a desirable ornecessary task, the nature of which has almost infinite permutations.Socrates and Seneca extol the mirror as a path to self-knowledge; it isalso used this way in myth. Most commonly, it is the channel by whichfemininity defines itself and masculinity improves itself – which, whenapproached in the prescribed way, reinforces the worth of its user. Buta mirror may too be a dangerous and even an insidious thing; itsassociations with black magic have survived to this day. In thepossession of a man it can lead him to the ruinous state (or so Romanmoralists assessed it) of self-absorption. Even a virtuous woman mustbeware of its corrupting powers.
When used as a metaphor, the Roman mirror isalways in some sense moral. Thus the term “moral mirror,” as it is usedin this book, refers to the mirror as a coded device, whether in art orliterature, and not just an artefact in every- day life.
REFLECTIONS IN REAL LIFE
How did Romans interact with reflection in everydaylife? Certainly there were fewer opportunities to encounter casualreflections in antiquity than we have today, except as vague, fugitiveshadows. Vitruvius observes that stucco can be polished to a mirrorsurface (7.3.11). Polished stone wall revetment became common in publicbuildings in the Julio-Claudian era, but its reflective properties wererelatively feeble, despite Suetonius' picturesque report that theemperor Domitian insisted on polished surfaces throughout his palace sothat 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 establishmentsthe walls were “resplendent with large and costly mirrors” (Ep.86.6, my transl.), probably of the full-length kind he so deplored inthe homes of the rich. He also attested to the newfangled trend ofinstalling large glass windows in baths (Ep. 86.4, 8; 90.25),which would have had some limited reflective value. We may reasonablysurmise that almost everyone owned, or had access to, some kind of handmirror for personal grooming.
Bronze mirrors, once popular among the elite inthe Aegean of the palatial period, disappeared from the Greek recordthereafter before emerging in the early sixth century B.C.E. They came to Italy at about the same time.29Personal mirrors were ubiquitous in the Roman world; extant examplessurely number in the thousands. They are far too scattered, and toopoorly cataloged, to be studied as a body, but fortunately there areenough dedicated collections and specialized publications to allow somegeneral assessments of their history, types, and distribution.30Roman mirrors were made of silver, bronze (itself often silvered ortinned), 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 setinto frames of contrasting materials, also became a widespreadaccessory in Roman households.32Often these were much smaller (they could have a diameter as tiny as2.5 cm), and so in order to be useful their surfaces were made convex.Natural convexity was achieved by blowing a globe of glass and coatingits interior with molten lead or some other metal, and then carefullysectioning the globe and working its segments into disks.33
Humble mirrors of this kind almost never appearin Roman art. The dignity of representation is granted only to the moreprestigious forms, which fall into a few general categories. First andforemost, the classic grip mirror: a disk of silver, bronze, orsilvered bronze, usually slightly smaller than a face, to which isattached a separate upright handle at the bottom.34Its surface may be flat or even concave, but much more commonly it isslightly convex. The backs of Roman grip mirrors rarely carry figuraldecoration but often are incised with concentric circles; the rim maybe smooth or decorated with perforations or scalloping (Fig. 1). Twoother common “prestige” types are the lid mirror and the box mirror.35The lid mirror, derived from a more elaborate Hellenistic prototype,consists of a thin disk and a separate lid that fits snugly over it. Itseems 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-thinreflective disk inserted into a separately made circular metal box witha removable lid. On a popular Gallic type, both sides of the box aredecorated with Neronian coins from the imperial mint in Lugdunum. Theclassic hinged subtype (the Klappspiegel ), looking much like amodern compact, was a Greek invention beloved also of Etruscanaristocratic 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.36Circular or square, the mirror's frame and lid could be made of bronze,wood, or bone. Many charming late-Republican or early-Imperialstatuettes from Myrina in Asia Minor (Fig. 2) portray a little Eroshoisting an oversize circular mirror of this type. One of the mostfamiliar 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 isuncertain 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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