These days, mirror play is something you do with babies and infants, but over the last six centuries or so it has also been a feature of many paintings. It all started in the Northern Renaissance, when leading Flemish painters including the van Eycks became fascinated in depicting optical phenomena including reflections in mirrors.

Jan van Eyck’s most famous painting, known as The Arnolfini Wedding (or similar variations), is a remarkable exploration of optics, featuring distorted reflections in the mirror near the centre of the painting, completed in 1434. Between this newly-wed couple holding hands next to their marital bed, in the midline of the painting, is a prominent circular convex mirror. Its reflection shows a view of the room looking in the opposite direction, past the couple to another two figures, who could be the artist and another, as shown in the detail below.

Just over a century later, in about 1545, in Venice, Tintoretto painted Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan. In this unusual interpretation, Vulcan is inspecting his wife, as Mars cowers under the bed at the right. A small dog is drawing attention to Mars’ hiding place, and Venus’ child, Cupid, rests in a cradle behind them. The circular mirror behind the bed reflects an image of Vulcan leaning over Venus, seen in the detail below.

For the pioneering still life painter Clara Peeters in the early years of the seventeenth century, reflections showed her self-portrait.

In her still life with Flowers and Gold Cups of Honour (1612) reflections in the gold cup at the right show her in the act of painting, as seen more clearly in the detail below.

In the middle of that century Diego Velázquez reversed the play in using a reflection to show the subjects of his painting, alongside his self-portrait.

Velázquez’ Las Meninas, translated as The Maids of Honour, from about 1656-57 is a well-known example of a group portrait with mirror play. In what is overtly a depiction of eleven people and a dog in a room in the Alcázar Palace, he uses composition and gaze to tell us more. Much depends on what we believe most of the figures are looking at. Reflected in the rectangular plane mirror on the far wall are King Philip IV and his wife Queen Mariana of Austria, shown in the detail below.

There has been dispute over whether the reflection shows the royal couple stood where the viewer is, or the mirror is reflecting their painted images on Velázquez’s canvas. How their images were generated is probably of secondary importance, as either way the gaze of most of the other figures is clearly directed not at the viewer, but at the King and Queen, who may be getting up to leave after sitting for Velázquez to paint them. In this reading, the most important people not in the painting only appear in reflection and the gaze of others.

Mirror play continued in a few more paintings up to the late nineteenth century.

Domenicus van Wijnen’s Witches’ Sabbath by Moonlight is set in a moonlit Italian landscape. This combines many of the now-classical symbols associated with ‘the dark arts’, and is taking place at an outdoor altar set up at the foot of the gallows, on which a dead body hangs. In front of the altar at the right is a soldier in armour, who is looking in a mirror at the image of another.

In about 1871, Alfred Stevens introduced a large mirror into The Psyché (My Studio). The French word psyché refers to the full-length mirror seen in this apparently informal view of Stevens’ studio, the name deriving from the legend of Cupid and Psyche. For this painting, Stevens doesn’t actually use a proper psyché, but has mounted a large mirror on his easel, perhaps to suggest that art is a reflection of life. A Japanese silk garment is draped over the mirror to limit its view to the model, breaking up her form in an unnatural way.

In the late nineteenth century mirror play became more popular, particularly in the paintings of Pierre Bonnard.

In 2003, the psychologists Marco Bertamini, Richard Latto and Alice Spooner published a paper in which they described a known phenomenon in the perception of paintings, and named it the Venus Effect. Their definition is: “The Venus effect occurs every time the observer sees both an actor (eg Venus) and a mirror, not placed along the observer’s line of sight, and concludes that Venus is seeing her reflection at the same location in the mirror that the observer is seeing.”

Although they dismissed optical “mistakes” as being of less interest, they were intrigued by “the situations in which we as observers read the scene in a certain way, but the mirror itself is used (deliberately or not) to lead us down the wrong path. More specifically, the mirror shows us something that we accept as the view available to the actor in the scene. However, the actor has a different vantage point
from us and therefore the laws of optics imply that he/she cannot be seeing what we see in the mirror.”

In this article, I explore what I believe to be the artist’s intention in this effect, of revealing the face of the subject of a painting in its reflection rather than in the original, a popular form of mirror play.

Frans Floris’s Allegory of Sight was probably painted around 1550, making it an early and quite sophisticated entry to the subject. The face of its figure is shown reflected in the only appropriate optical instrument of the day: a simple mirror, carefully angled to project most of the face. Although only a small feature, that reflection looks fiendishly difficult, given the wildly different angle between the mirror and the picture plane. In this case, what’s shown in the mirror is optically plausible, although the subject is looking at the viewer rather than the reflection.

This painting of Sight has been attributed to Abraham Janssens, and could date to any time between about 1590 and 1632. It appears to have been inspired by Floris’s Allegory of Sight, and the reflection of the woman’s face in the mirror doesn’t appear optically correct. She does appear to be looking at her reflection, although that’s optically impossible.

Hans von Aachen’s David and Bathsheba of about 1612-15 introduces a figure standing behind Bathsheba, holding a mirror in front of her face with his outstretched left arm. A glance at that reflection says that something is seriously amiss: von Aachen has painted a reflection in which Bathsheba is looking to the left, although her face is actually looking to the right. No single plane mirror could ever achieve that optical impossibility.

Although often illustrated by one of Titian’s paintings of Venus, the canonical example must be Velázquez’ Venus at Her Mirror, also known as The Toilet of Venus or the Rokeby Venus, from 1644-48. It shows the goddess Venus, whose face is blurred in a false reflection in a mirror being held by her son Cupid. The theme was common, seen in paintings by Titian and Rubens, with Venus sat upright. Giorgione and others had posed her reclining and facing the viewer, making her pose here unusual. Most other paintings of Venus set her in a landscape: here she rests on luxurious even sensuous fabrics.

No matter how convincing her face might appear in the mirror, a moment spent placing yourself in the same position confirms that the image in the mirror is wholly imaginary, and optically incorrect. Yet, according to Bertamini and others, the majority of viewers succumb to the Venus Effect and believe that Venus is looking at that image of her face.

JW Waterhouse’s Mariana in the South from about 1897 stands her in front of a full-length mirror revealing her face to the viewer, but she too is looking at her own reflection.

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema’s A Knock at the Door, also from 1897, shows an attractive young woman checking that she is looking at her best in a mirror, before receiving a visitor. Once again it is the reflection that shows her face, and we’re struggling to be sure whether this is optically correct, although in this case the artist has at least brought closer alignment between the two optical axes.

Frederick Carl Frieseke’s Nude Seated at Her Dressing Table (1909) also uses closer alignment to appear more optically plausible, as this nude apparently studies herself in the mirror.

Walter Crane made this watercolour and ink drawing of The Mirror for Arthur Kelly’s The Rosebud and Other Tales, published in 1909. Although there are clear disparities between the alignment of face and chest with their reflection, this too appears plausible.

Lovis Corinth’s At the Mirror from 1912 complicates this further by raising the viewer well above the subject and her reflection, and revealing the artist standing behind her.

There are a few paintings where the artist has overtly declined to employ the Venus Effect.

Tintoretto’s Susannah and the Elders from about 1555 goes further with mirror play. Susannah has been caught as she is drying her leg after bathing in the small pool beside her, looking at herself in a rectangular mirror, which is propped up against a rosy trellis in a secluded part of her garden. Unlike in other paintings of nudes, neither the image seen in the mirror nor the reflection on the water show anything more of Susannah.