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.

Chapter Four examines how the vocabulary of visual abstraction emerged from the language of nineteenth-century studies in optics and psychology and was supported by developments in the occult sciences and currents in modernist thought. It connects Riegl’s definition of late antique style with these developments.

Chapter Two argues that the interest in and definition of late antique art promoted by Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl was in part spurred by political conditions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Chapter Five considers the definition of mimesis in the visual arts to argue that ancient ideas of visual imitation encompassed a wide range of styles, among them formal solutions modern observers would consider abstract. It posits that the stylistic language deployed by Hermogenes of Tarsus in his rhetorical treatise Peri Ideon can be applied to the description of late antique visual art.

Chapter Seven considers images that depict ceremonial events in the wider context of the narratives in which they were embedded. Using Hermogenes of Tarsus’s rhetorical categories as an interpretive model, it discusses the historical frieze from the Arch of Constantine in Rome and the imperial panels depicting Justinian and Theodora in the church of San Vitale, Ravenna.

The introduction argues that the current understanding of late antique style as abstract and spiritual is not supported by the evidence. It surveys the trajectory of this idea in the literature of late antique art and proposes an alternative approach based on concepts of style outlined in late antique rhetorical theory.