Art historian Wu Hung’s history takes a single object type—“a tall glass mirror standing on the floor that can reflect the viewer’s entire body” (p. 7)—and traces its history, via instances and examples, through time and space and across the boundaries between the usually discreet histories of objects, painting, and photography.
This is indeed a globe-spanning history—there are few diversions south, but across the northern hemisphere the book moves fluidly back and forth along a west–east alignment from Europe to China and North America. Wu Hung acknowledges that “no single person could possibly be versed” in all the periods and geographies covered (p. 10). In a generous preface, he credits the multinational networks of scholars who guided the research and provided archival materials to make possible a volume that “encompasses vast geographical regions and spans over two millennia in human history” (p. 10).
A prelude focuses on mirror-like objects in Graeco-Roman Europe and Han-dynasty China. In European classical civilization, such objects survive only in literature and art. The most famous is the shield given by the goddess Athena to Perseus, with which he was able to view, and so kill, the snake-haired gorgon Medusa without being subject to her (literally) petrifying stare. Mirrors, notes Wu Hung, had powers of mediation between humans and gods, and in literature and legend they were points of entry between the everyday and supernatural worlds (just as later when Alice entered the looking-glass). Parallel in time to depictions of Perseus and Medusa, Han China produced large rectangular bronze mirrors, of which a very few examples survive. Literary sources describe how these mirrors, like their European counterparts, were believed to reveal truths beyond unmediated sight. The First Emperor’s Gall-Bladder Mirror made visible the interior organs of anyone looking into it: women of the palace who were shown by the mirror to have “engorged gall bladders and stirred hearts”—a sign of “aberrant thoughts”—were killed, just as Medusa was by Perseus and his mirror-shield (p. 29).
Beyond this prelude in myth and legend, the history-proper commences in Europe in the seventeenth century, where workshops serving the court of Louis XIV of France perfected mirror-making techniques developed in Venice, culminating in the magnificence of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors. Smaller, but still body-length, freestanding mirrors quickly became an essential feature of wealthy homes, and from Europe large mirrors were traded and sent as diplomatic gifts to China. This is where the story becomes truly global, encompassing not just multiple examples co-existing in separate geographies, but complex patterns of connection and exchange. Qing-dynasty emperors took the European mirrors and developed them within the interior spaces of their palaces, where they were mounted in ornate and ingenious frames and used to block and deflect sightlines and to expand optical space. This section of the book draws on the rich material of the Imperial Workshop archives and is densely supported with meticulously analyzed detail, such as Emperor Yongzheng’s commission in 1728 for the installation of a new full-length mirror into the Hall of Mental Cultivation in the Forbidden City in Beijing. The archives record the emperor’s exacting instructions for fitting the mirror into a sliding screen, and his displeasure with the resulting work, which he dismissed as “very stupid” (p. 64). He immediately ordered the job to be redone, with precise instructions for the new work. The project was eventually completed to Yongzheng’s liking, although not before he had further rejected a trompe l’oeil painting on the mirror screen’s reverse, demanding instead illusionistic images of books. Wu Hung meticulously dissects archival evidence for clues to the size of these royal mirrors, the materials and styles of their frames, and how they were built into architectural features or constructed as freestanding objects. He describes how large mirrors were used to create illusion and opulence in the quarters of royal concubines, and he explores their literary and political symbolism.
This section, based on the Workshop Archives, is the most closely argued, and to this reader, revelatory of all the book’s instances of full-length mirrors, showing how an object type was adapted within the materially and symbolically rich environments of the Chinese imperial palaces, where many examples still survive. Yongzheng—the exacting commissioner of the sliding mirror screen—is further identified as an invisible but potent presence (represented by an empty chair) in a delicate, monochrome ink-on-silk painting of the early eighteenth century in which a woman gazes at herself full-length in a freestanding mirror. This painting, Beauty at Mirror, is claimed by Wu Hung as “the sole example of this type of image in the world” at this date, pointing forward to the proliferation of such images within photography the following century (p. 93).
This is the territory of the second half of the book, which explores how full-length mirror photography spread globally as a new mechanism of subjectivity. Wu Hung takes us back to Europe, to the invention of photography in the first half of the nineteenth century, and to early pioneers of photographic portraiture. Lady Clementina Hawarden’s evocative 1860s portraits of her daughters doubled in mirrors use “coexisting images inside and outside the mirror to construct a fuller and more complex personhood” (p. 157). Further sections explore mirror portraits campaigning for the education of freed slaves in post-Civil War US, and an interesting account of women photographers in the Thai royal family. These passages present fascinating material, although not always with completely compelling and focused linkages to the book’s central themes. These come sharply back into focus, however, with a return to China and the photographic genre of the queue-cutting portrait. These studio photographs use full-length mirrors as the means by which some young men recorded the sartorial effects of the founding of the Republic of China in 1912. One of the Republic’s first laws demanded that all men cut their traditional long queues of hair. Many recorded the event with a photograph. An example is Wang Yian: he faces the camera in the photographer’s studio; at the same time a full-length mirror reflects him from behind, documenting the long hair that was about to be sacrificed to modernity. Wang Yian described the process in a note on the photograph, “I determined to cut my queue. Therefore I used a large mirror to reflect my back, to preserve [the image of my queue] for memory’s sake. It was on the third day of the eighth month, or September thirteenth in the new calendar.” (p. 221). As Wu Hung notes, such images capture the subjectivity of these men at a moment of profound personal and political change, implying “the transient present” and acting to “reify this fleeting moment into stable images” (p. 228).
This is a book of valuable synthesizing insight, pursuing an object type with deftness across time and space. It is lucidly and engagingly written, with ambition and confidence, and, especially in the more densely evidenced passages, deploys archival material with great clarity. The book is richly illustrated throughout, with detailed discussion of images so that visual material stands alongside the archival sources as a firm evidence base for this innovative and original history of an object across place and period.
