Mirror, Mirror

Jonathan Miller is one of those outrageously talented people who make the rest of us seem lazy and incurious by comparison. Opera and theater director, essayist, television producer, filmmaker and lecturer in cognitive science and the history of medicine, he won early fame (both in his native England and on Broadway) as a comic actor in 1961 when, with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett, he created the satirical revue “Beyond the Fringe.” That he is a doctor, too, will give small comfort to all those made sick with envy at the scope of his accomplishments. It should surprise nobody that he has now turned his attention to art--what else was left? To his expansive subject matter he brings a quirky, insightful, nonacademic perspective.

At first, “On Reflection” seems a handsomely illustrated art book exploring the uses of mirrors and other sources of reflected light in paintings and photography. Nearly every page offers delicious color reproductions ranging, as might be expected, from 15th century Van Eycks and Durers to contemporary work by Stephen Conroy and Lucien Freud, as well as photographs and stills from classic films.

Aiming to delight as well as inform the reader, Miller has searched the byways and basements of museum collections to include work unfamiliar to most viewers. In fact, Miller succeeds most thoroughly when rummaging at the margins of art history, placing artists like Ferdinand Hodler, Luis Melendez and Sebastien Stoskopff alongside the recognizable masters. But Miller is too much the polymath to restrict himself to artistic precincts: He throws optics, cognitive psychology, theories of perception and neurology into the mix. He dispels the misconception that the Narcissus of myth fell in love with his own reflected image--he actually thought he was looking at another person--as easily as he explains how children recognize their faces in a mirror, and at what age they are first able to do so (16 to 24 months).

Miller has organized the book by topic--”Highlights,” “Shading and Shining,” “The Camera as Mirror” et cetera--which makes it easy for readers to leaf through, taking in a few pages at a time. He also provides ample sidebars and useful, clearly written captions. I only wish Miller would tell more of a story, take the historical approach, instead of hopping from concept to concept. Stories, after all, hold our attention; lectures on “light and lustre” put the class to sleep.

On the other hand, the sheer variety of his speculations, the way he takes a gem of a topic and displays each of its facets, makes up for Miller’s occasionally dry manner. He pays almost microscopic attention to paintings. For instance, undistracted by the kneeling donor and fantastic dragon-like creature in Bermejo’s “Saint Michael Triumphant Over the Devil,” Miller points out the minuscule reflection of the heavenly city in the saint’s breastplate. Using shrewdly cropped images of fruit reflected in Alexandre-Francois Desportes’ “Silver Tureen With Peaches,” he isolates exactly how the artist achieves the luminous brilliance of the picture. The effect of incandescent reflection does not simply result from the choice of pigment, rather Miller explains that the “perceived lustre is caused by the imagery of something reflected in the surface of the object in question. And yet the visibility of the reflection is subordinated to that of the object itself, so that what we consciously see is a lustrous object . . . “ In other words, we don’t especially notice the peaches mirrored in the silver tureen, but that’s what makes it shine.

Still, shininess accounts for only one sense of the word “reflection.” In order to explore the notion of multiple mirror-images, Miller relates an anecdote from Vasari about a debate between the Italian Renaissance artists Andrea Verrocchio and Giorgione. Verrocchio, who was at the time casting a bronze horse, claimed that sculpture was superior to painting because it showed all sides of a person or object. Giorgione argued painting’s superiority, saying that a picture can show all sides of an object in a single glance, while one had to walk around a sculpture, taking many glances, in order to see the whole. To prove his point, Giorgione painted a nude with her back turned, standing by a pool of water that reflected her front. On one side of the nude he painted the burnished corselet she had removed and which reflected one side view; on the other side of her, he painted a mirror for her to look in. In a single painting, Giorgione depicted all sides of the nude.

Miller is equally given to provocative analysis. Late in the book he considers the motif of self-regard in a group of pictures. He suggests that whenever a person is portrayed looking at him- or herself in a mirror, the artist either intends an “ethically neutral, nonjudgmental” representation, “in which the mirror figures as one of the many household appliances” or a moralizing tableau “in which the subjects’ preoccupation with their reflection is represented as a personification of either a vice or a virtue”--vanity being the vice, prudence or wisdom (figured as self-knowledge) the virtue.

Miller certainly makes a virtue of his omnivorous learning. He lights a path through a vast subject, one in which a lesser guide might certainly have lost himself and his readers. Perhaps “On Reflection” would have benefited from deeper, more minute reflection on some of the topics Miller visits only briefly, but then we would be poorer, left with a denser, less brilliantly manifold volume.*