M, p.34
M, page 34
After laconically listing enough personal belongings to suggest M had been basically camping out in his nice rented house, with a few sticks of furniture, the very short inventory, evidently following the lawyer inventorist’s passage upstairs and his final arrival in the room M used as his studio, listed at the end the working materials M had abandoned when he left town in a hurry …
Item two large unpainted canvases.
Item one old chest with various rags inside.
Item three stools. Item a big mirror. Item a mirror shield.
Item three other smaller pictures.
Item one three legged bench.
Item three large unpainted canvases. Item one large painting on wood.
Item one ebony case with a knife inside.
Item three bed bolsters.
Item one high wooden easel.
Item one small trolley with various packets of coloured paint pigments.
Item one halbard. Item two other unpainted canvases.
M must’ve taken all his paintbrushes with him. The presence of the two mirrors not among the personal effects but among the painting things showed that M was still – in some way – using mirror reflections in setting up his work. Right at the outset of his painting career in Rome, M had used mirrors, as Baglione remembered and the early Sick self portrait showed. When Baglione mentioned some little paintings done in the mirror as M’s first independent efforts he was underscoring M’s poverty and isolation in those early days – his failure to make any sales, his poverty, his terrible clothes. But if mirrors were still among the few essential working items ten years later, they were now more than an economy measure, and likely always had been.
The younger M had been fascinated by the play of light on glass and through glass. The meticulousness with which he rendered what happened to sunlight on a carafe of water or a glass of wine, the way that light was trapped in the heart of shadow the carafe then cast on a white tablecloth, the way the light caressed the bulging surface and gave the glass form even as the rays were refracted through glass and water and left their own stamp on the glass’s surface, in the shape of the rectangular window through which they’d arrived – this loving attention to the ways of the energy at the source of his art was still being given play a couple of years later, in the flask of water and the glass of white wine on the table of the Meal at Emmaus he’d done for Mattei at the end of 1601.
From then on, as the pressures of making complex human figure compositions mounted, M’s concern with reflected and refracted light retreated to the implicit and the practical. From being the end of his painting it more and more became the means. How could it help him paint? He no longer needed mirrors to provide him with a model, though he would’ve continued to use them when he occasionally included a self portrait in a history, like the one in Christ taken. Yet what the lawyer found in M’s abandoned studio seemed to indicate that mirrors were still integral to M’s work in the studio. What wasn’t clear was how he used them. Some of his early paintings did have the look of reflected images. Anna Bianchini was painted as the Penitent Magdalen somewhat from above, with an oddly foreshortened effect about her skirt and the stool she was sitting on, as if M had been standing quite near her and painting not Anna but her reflection in a downward looking mirror on the wall overhead. And unless Mario Minniti was left handed, when he stood in as Bacchus M painted his reflection in a mirror.
Mirrors weren’t new in painting. They fascinated the mannerists in the previous century as a means of modifying images. Parmigianino’s Self portrait in a convex mirror was an overt and extreme case of playful experimentation among many less obvious ones like his own Long necked Madonna. Images elongated in a mirror’s distorting reflection lent a more aristocratic beauty and elegance than anything mere nature had to offer. When Garzoni wrote about mirrors and mirror makers some time before 1585, in his huge compendium of trades, his imagination was entirely caught up with their manifold power of weird illusion. Practical uses in art or science went unmentioned. Garzoni didn’t mention painting, but he was writing at the height of mannerist preciousness and his outlook showed it. As a popular moralist he was firm about mirror making that
in the end this art is quite vain and useless to the world and used more often for worldly amusement than anything else. It shows itself more trifling and bizarre than good and useful.
M’s use for mirrors reached back beyond the mannerists to Leonardo. Before the mannerists began playing with mirrors as a way of modifying and improving on nature, Leonardo had been emphatic that the mirror – the flat mirror, true undistorting – was the painters’ master.
When you want to see if your painting corresponds overall to the thing painted from life, get a mirror and reflect the living thing in it, and compare the reflection with your painting … [and if you’ve done it right] your painting too will look like a natural thing seen in a big mirror.
Leonardo’s vocabulary here – la cosa ritratta dal naturale … una cosa naturale vista in un grande specchio – sounded much like M’s when he said at his trial that skill in painting meant knowing how to dipingere bene et imitar bene le cose naturali, paint well and imitate natural things. Leonardo’s advice to match painting with a mirror image as a simple reality check was compatible with his insistence on the importance of mathematical perspective in creating a true image. But sometimes Leonardo implied that the mind itself was like a mirror. Earlier in the Book of painting he noted that
the painter’s mind should be like a mirror and always take on the colour of whatever’s its object and fill up with as many likenesses as there are things in front of it.
At times, when he wrote about painting, Leonardo’s urge to understand and control nature – and linear perspective was a means of doing this in art – gave way to this notion of a receptive intelligence that extended to all the functions of the mind and made the painter’s mind a unique microcosm. The painter was not as other men, but a being apart. Developing the idea of a mirror mind, he added
The painter should be solitary and consider what he sees and speak with himself, choosing the most excellent parts in the appearance of everything he sees. He should be like a mirror and change himself into as many colours as there are in the things that appear in front of him. Doing so, he’ll seem to himself to be a second nature.
When Leonardo wrote about linear perspective for painters in the Book of painting – he dropped the idea of writing on the maths of it when he heard Piero della Francesca already had – he was drawing on what’d gone before in the way of theorizing about space in art – Alberti’s chapter on perspective in his book De pictura in the fourteen thirties and Piero’s more rigorously mathematical treatise De prospectiva pingendi fifty years later. And the notion behind all the theories of perspective and behind the painting practice the theories tried to codify was that a painting was like a window. Looking at a painting you were looking out at more or less distant objects that lay beyond the picture plane. Leonardo himself advised the use of a pane of glass to fix a scene for painting. In M’s time Guidubaldo and Galileo were still thinking on this model. When Leonardo wrote more subjectively about the way the world impressed itself on the mind through the eye, as a kind of feeling mirror, and the way the mind’s response matched what it saw, he was looking as it were inward rather than outward, from the picture plane toward the perceiving self. He was also looking forward rather than backward in time, anticipating concerns with the way people perceived the world – the very nature of seeing – that were becoming a matter of very intense study in several quarters a hundred years later, at the time M was painting in Rome. The uses of the mirror, in the first years of the seventeenth century, were of more than metaphorical interest.
When M was working in Rome, the mirror was part of the instrument called a camera obscura – lately developed and refined in Naples by the scientist and playwright Giambattista Della Porta.
In a small circle of paper, you shall see as it were the Epitomy of the whole world.
In its simplest form the camera obscura had been known since ancient times and used as a kind of pinhole camera for viewing eclipses without having to stare at the sun. Della Porta had shown for the first time in 1589 how a camera obscura with a lens and a mirror could be used to cast an image on a screen – his Natural magic was a major work on optics that also contained the first theoretical account of the telescope. Galileo’s later actual telescope was also, as it happened, anticipated by Johannes Kepler in a book published in Frankfurt in 1604, the same year M was working with mirrors in the studio of his newly rented house in vico San Biagio. Kepler too failed to develop his telescope discovery – at least partly because the main object of the research described in his book wasn’t the telescope itself but the camera obscura. Kepler was interested in understanding and refining the workings of the camera obscura for astronomical use in observing the sun. Doing so involved understanding the optical working of the human eye itself, and in his 1604 book Kepler gave the first accurate account of the way the eye’s lens formed an image on the retina. Suggestively, he called that image a picture, implying that the image was to some extent at least a creation of the seeing eye and not an objectively transmitted datum. Kepler wrote that vision is brought about by a picture of the thing seen being formed on the concave surface of the retina. His own interest in sight stopped with the formation of that upside down image, and he left to philosophers and neurologists the question of how it related to human perception of the world. What he’d found, going back to the problems with the distorted solar images rendered by the camera obscura, was that the human eye itself played a part in the distortion and that
the origin of errors in vision must be sought in the conformation and functions of the eye itself.
Seeing this meant making a distinction between things in the world and their image, or picture, or representation on the retina. Ut pictura, ita visio, sight was like a picture.
* * *
SEEING THE WORLD as an image on a screen, or a mirror, or the retina of the eye, and seeing a picture as a projected, refracted, reflected image was a rather different way of thinking about visual art from the idea of looking out on things through a window. The mirror was an emblem and maybe an enabler of the newly accessible inwardness in painting. M’s great struggle with Matthew killed in 1600, when he’d wrestled with prospectival painting and finally thrown it over for images of an hallucinatory vividness – hallucinatory because they were looming at you out of the picture plane instead of receding behind it, not caught in a grid of perspectival lines but swimming at you in all the unnerving clarity of their strong relief out of the murky dark, and because you weren’t sure where you stood in relation to them, so that everything was unsettled, mobile – had been the point of no return.
There’d been signs before that, like the Basket of fruit projecting on its ledge, the Medusa’s severed head seeming to float in a concave space. And one painting M had done just before the Matthew side paintings had the force of a proclamation. In 1599 one large mirror had let him paint Narcissus, and the mirror had entered the painting itself as the sheet of dark water spread out in front of the kneeling boy. The mirror was asserting its part in the creation with polemical force. The painting included the boy and his image, what he was and what he saw. Just as M was starting to strengthen his darks, he’d done a painting that was half reflection, life seen in a glass darkly so that everything was even more subdued than the real boy looking down, almost engulfed in lightlessness, and all you saw were shadows and some brilliant points of light. The boy’s billowing hitched up sleeves, a mass of dazzling creamy silk above, were reduced in their reflection below to the merest highlights. It was what M was doing in his art, stripping it down so that you had to work down from these minimalist highlights, and when he started painting for the churches you’d be picking out these points of light in the gloom of a badly lit chapel, in the mean daylight arriving through a small dirty window high overhead or the flickering yellow flames of candles, to recreate the image in your own mind. Narcissus was a manifesto for M’s new art.
So was the other painting he’d shown a mirror in, the Martha & Mary he’d done just before Narcissus. The mirror in that painting was the other one, the convex mirror shield that M had taken to his new lodging and the lawyer later found there. In Martha & Mary the mirror’s part was more pictorial. Yet the mirror did also make the painting’s dazzling focus a tiny and brilliant white rectangle on its upper curve. That point of brilliant light was the reflection of the high small window or skylight that lit the scene M was painting, as a high and focused light source out of sight to the left lit most of M’s scenes. Mary draped her arm over the mirror with her fingers pointing at the diamond of white light in case you missed its significance, and Fillide’s deformed ring finger on her left hand, which’d last been draped on the hilt of Catherine’s long and murderous sword, showed – like the teeth missing from the ivory comb lying by the makeup dish with its scrap of brown sponge – that natural light lit up real life.
The mirror was convex, like the one Parmigianino used for his playful Self portrait and like the mirror on the back wall that reflected Van Eyck’s Arnolfini marriage portrait. A convex reflection enhanced the immediacy of what was near and central and minimized the peripheral, and the one shown in Martha & Mary was also a dark convex mirror that obscured neutral tones and left only the highlights – useful in heightening images like the ones M was now painting. Looking with horror at your own reflection in a mirror like this, you’d see something like the severed head of the Medusa painted on its round shield – to look at M’s painted shield with its floating head and writhing snakes would elicit that horror. M’s painting imitated and provoked a horrified reflection in a mirror shield like the one in his studio. Was it his own mirror, or Leonardo’s earlier realization of the same effect that’d given M the Medusa idea?
The square of light the mirror reflected in its darkness in Martha & Mary was the illumination from high up that all the early critics said M used to light his mises en scène in a dark walled space. It wasn’t at all, as Giulio Mancini pointed out, natural. M and his followers were distinctive in lighting their work, Mancini wrote,
with a single light coming down from high up, without reflections, as it would from a window into a room with the walls painted black. So with the lights being very light and the shadows very dark, these come to give relief to the painting, but in a way that’s not natural. It wasn’t used or imagined in other centuries by older painters like Raphael, Titian, Correggio and the others. Working like this, this school’s very attentive to reality and always paints with the living model right in front of it. It works well for single figures, but …
Sandrart said the same thing.
… to bring out those effects of relief and natural roundedness better, he used dark vaults or other shadowed rooms with one small light above, so that the light falling on the model made strong shadows in the darkness …
And so, with his own moralistic forcing, did Bellori.
He took this working method so far that he never let any of his figures come out into the sunlight. He found a way of setting them off against the dark air of a closed room and taking a high light that came straight down on to the main part of the body and left the rest in shadow. That way he achieved strength through the contrast of light and dark.
The particular setting – the dark closed space and the single light source above – were so intrinsic to M’s whole way of imitating natural things that the nature of studio space available was of crucial importance to him. In the vast high ceilinged palaces of Del Monte and the Mattei brothers he’d presumably found it easy to get the kind of working space he needed. The studio in the palazzo Madama likely had its own role in M’s discovery of the painting environment that suited him, and pushed his art in the direction it took. But the modest two storey house he was renting from Prudenzia Bruni didn’t offer the same convenience. When she later went to court against M in his absence, her claim was upheld for eighty scudi. Part of this was for six months’ unpaid back rent and the rest for repairs to a damaged ceiling. Six months’ rent was twenty scudi – the cost of fixing the broken ceiling was put at a year and a half’s rent. It was unlikely to have been an accident, and hard not to think that M found it necessary to knock a hole in the ceiling of his studio to get exactly the right kind of overhead lighting he was looking for. Why the obsession with setting the scene and getting the lighting just right? It was, as the formidably empirical physician Mancini remarked, not natural. But imitating natural things was only ever part of the story. M also believed a good man ought to know how to do his job well, and for a painter that meant knowing how to paint well. Natural had nothing to do with the painter’s theme – quite different from young Annibale Carracci’s early Bean eater or Boy drinking or Man and monkey, or Butcher’s shop, which all showed a feel for ordinary people in their vigorous unglamorous everyday lives that was never M’s.
Was M ever aware of that more subdued and private disaster that was working itself out in parallel to his own in another part of town? It was the awful pull of the eleven years older Carracci’s – a marvellously vital and more variously resourceful painter than M – alienation from the humanity of his art, as he generalized, classicized, giganticized, idealized, mythologized it out of existence to oblige Odoardo Farnese and his other Roman patrons. Bellori chose to see it as a kind of divine intervention in art – Annibale Carracci’s being sent to save painting from the opposed and equally hideous fates of mannerism and naturalism. M’s own course ran parallel to Annibale’s, but M was moving in the reverse direction. Inwardly and outwardly, the precious dreamy solipsism of ten years earlier was being transmuted now, under the pressure of M’s unmovable constancy in his own ways of seeing, into a terrible sense of the limits of life.
Natural in M was only the utter fidelity to his own optical sensations, the minute fixation on his own visual contact with the world, a contact that became more intense – more ecstatic – as M inexorably reduced it to the picking out of ever feebler highlights, exacerbating the contrast between light and dark, visible and invisible, and recreating a world of forms and textures out of the glinting reflections in the dark. He made you do it too, follow the strenuous play of his eye and mind, creating the forms in the darkened theatre of his studio. This was natural. All the rest, in the most literal sense imaginable, was window dressing. Whether M’s use of mirrors went beyond using them to frame the figures he was painting and fix them in two dimensions – whether it extended to practical experiments with Della Porta’s camera obscura of the kind Vermeer and other painters would later be making in the low countries – wasn’t clear. The camera obscura had been well popularized in Giambattista Della Porta’s bestselling new edition of his book, which had been around for some years, and it had to enthral a painter obsessed with optical images. But M and Vermeer were painters fascinated by the way reality impinged on their own direct vision of things. An interest in its working as an analogy of their own sight, and a feeding back of its images into the way they rendered their own on canvas, didn’t necessarily translate into its use as some kind of mechanical aid. What mattered for M was what his own eyes saw.
