The Mirror: A History by Sabine Melchoir-Bonnet
Requirements: ePUB Reader, 2.3MB
Overview: Sabine Melchior-Bonnet marries science and art, literature and philosophy, and history and meditation with a mastery and a quality of writing that is, at times, dizzying. The very idea of a historical essay on the mirror is remarkable. How could we not have thought of it earlier?
Many painters represented Mary and the baby Jesus holding a mirror. One also said in the Middle Ages that God is the perfect mirror because “he is a shining mirror unto himself.” Furthermore, Plato affirmed that the soul is the reflection of the divine. Later, Saint Augustine expressed this idea more precisely, in a more tragic mode, suggesting that the man who sees himself in the mirror of the Bible sees both the splendor of God and his own wretchedness. For Dürer, who represented himself as the Suffering Christ, man is the self-portrait of God, and God’s face authenticates man’s. Yet another aspect of the mirror’s meaning was the medieval speculum, such as the one compiled by the thirteenth-century Dominican monk Vincent de Beauvais, a vast encyclopedia attempting to catalog all knowledge. Finally, the numerous metaphorical “mirrors” of medieval literature, notably the “mirrors of princes,” constituted a moralistic genre in which readers were invited to look upon an ideal model for their behavior.
Genre: Non-Fiction, History
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