Mirrored Realities- True or False? Questioning Van Eyck, Velasquez and
Manet.
Amy Ione, Independent Scholar,
Berkeley, California
James W. McManus, Art and Art
History, California State University, Chico
Abstract:
This paper surveys three artists who
grappled so expertly with some of the tensions between paintings and mirrors
that their work continues to excite, baffle and puzzle viewers even today. They
are Jan van Eyck (the Arnoldfini Double Portrait), Diego Velquez (Las Meninas)
and Edouard Manet (Bar at the Folies Bergre). Each artist provides a compositional puzzle engaging us
in a dialectic between the painters illusion of internal space, and the
mirror, a flat surface only capable of reflecting that which is separate from
its surface. The dialectic between the painters illusion of space and that of
the mirror emerges in our minds when we discover the discrepancies between the
order of the paintings internal space, its relationship to the viewers
presumed focal position and the conflict with mirrors reflected image of
external space. Working from this conflict we will contend that each artist
constructs a conundrum; each playing deliciously off the viewers perceptions
and their initial presumption of the paintings objectivity.
It's
All Done with Mirrors: Ether Theory from Bronte to Woolf
Russel Kauffman, Department of Physics, Muhlenberg
College and
Barri Gold,
Department of English, Muhlenberg College
Abstract:
Light, in the mid-19th century, was a wave, moving
through an invisible medium, reflecting, refracting, absorbing, connecting us
with sight and insight to the world around us. By the early 20th century, light
had taken on a dualistic character: traveling in packets or quanta through a
medium which was no medium at all, light had become a wave-particle, and wave,
now decidedly probabilistic, made up of all matter.
This same period witnessed a rich proliferation
within British womens fiction of the trope of the mirror - a trope which could
not fail to reflect shifting popular physical understandings of the nature of
light. This work will explore the interaction of light theory and the literary
mirror focusing on two key figures: Charlotte Bront and Virginia Woolf. How,
for example, does the proliferation of mirrors in Jane Eyre, as well as the
structural mirroring effected via the doppleganger, reveal an investment in
continuity and media, fluids and mechanism characteristic of 19th-century
physical theory? How does the mirror reshape itself in The Waves, The Voyage
Out, and The Lady in the Looking Glass under the influence of
quantum-mechanical and relativistic models of light, irremovably uncertain and
observer dependent? How does the literary mirror reflect the notion that the
behavior of nature itself depends critically on who is looking?