Making Self Portraits
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Podcast transcript MAKING SELF PORTRAITS Hello, and welcome to a podcast from Royal Collection Trust. Today's lecture at The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, is given by Lucy Peter, Assistant Curator of Paintings. In this lecture, Lucy talks about the art of creating a self-portrait. Other talks and lectures within our events programme can be found using our what's on guide on our website. So hello, and welcome to The Queen's Gallery, for those of you who haven't been here before. So as Lexi said, I'm Lucy Peter and I'm Assistant Curator at Royal Collection Trust. Today, in this talk, I'm going to be looking really at how artists made self-portraits. Firstly, thinking about the production and availability of mirrors and what impact the invention of flat glass mirrors had on the development of self-portraiture in general. And then in the second half I'm going to be looking at how artists use mirrors to paint self-portraits and what unique challenges this presented them with. So really to start with I just want to say that before the invention of photography artists had to use mirrors to produce self-portraits. Thus one of the fundamental, practical considerations with painted self-portraits, and easy to forget today, was the availability and the quality of the mirrors. The mirror, as we know it today, a flat glass surface with a metal coated back, was not invented until around 1500. And before this, artists had to make do with what mirrors were available, which invariably would produce either a discoloured or a distorted reflection. While it's hard to quantify what level of impact the invention of the first flat glass mirror has had on artists, it's also long been suggested that the development of self-portraiture at the turn of the 16th century, is directly linked to this whole development of larger, clearer mirrors at around the same date. So this is the question I'm going to come back to bit later. <Footer addr ess> But I just wanted to start by looking at some of the very earliest mirrors. so although flat glass mirrors did not emerge until the 16th century, this is not to say that mirrors don't exist at all. So on the left here I've just put – this is an ancient Egyptian mirror from the British Museum, so it was a mirror made of polished metal, or bronze, and here we can see that the figure, the handle itself, was made of the figure of a goddess, because mirrors were incredibly important in the grooming process in ancient Egypt. And then on the right here, this is again from the British Museum, it's a detail here taken from a classical Greek vase and you can see again this polished metal mirror hanging on the wall on the right. Remarkably, you could get quite a clear image from a polished metal mirror, but the downside is that you had to polish it before each use. this was normally done with an animal skin. Historically we also know that mirrors have always been regarded as very prized possessions, so this is something that persisted into the 18th century. The ancient Roman philosopher, Seneca, who was a tutor, and later advisor to Emperor Nero, recorded that for a single one of those mirrors, chiselled silver or gold, woman are capable of spending amount equal to the dowry the state once offered to poor general's daughters. So they were hugely, hugely costly. Another popular form of mirror was this, which is called an obsidian mirror. So it's an igneous rock and again I was so shocked at the clarity of the image which you can see on the right. Again this is in the British Museum. This is an Aztec mirror, but you can see this is a reflection of a light box with a comb on it, and it's completely brilliant really. Metal mirrors continue to be used throughout the Medieval period and I found this, which is a detail taken from The Luttrell Psalter and we can see here that the woman on the right, the maidservant in blue, is assisting the lady on the left in platting her hair and you can see that she's holding what would have been a metal mirror. So the first great advancement in mirror making came in the 14th century, when the glass makers of Nuremburg, which became the centre for glass making, developed a form of mirror made from a glass bubble. A glass ball was blown and injected with molten lead or tin. I've put this up, this is an 18th century print but it shows the kind of mirror making, the glass making processes. So here we've got – this is a man blowing a glass ball through a tube. Once cool, once this ball had been injected with lead, smaller pieces could be cut off to create small, hand held, convex mirrors. But the problem with convex mirrors is that although the image was very clear, it was also distorted, as we know, with convex mirrors, so things closer to the mirror appear enlarged, and things further away appear much smaller. This illustration is taken from what was known as the book of trades. It was published in Frankfurt in 1568, and it essentially shows various professions that were took place in Nuremberg at that time and its things like the copper smith, the clock maker, the baker and it had a sort of little poem underneath each of these illustrations and this one shows Der Spiegler, or the Mirror Maker. And what's so fascinating about this print is that all the glasses here, all these mirrors, are convex and you can see the smaller ones here, which would have been quite affordable, and the larger ones here. But what you'll notice about the larger ones is that they've got this very uneven surface and this was an effect of blowing a glass bubble and that you couldn’t always create this very even surface. So very famous painting, but from the early 15th century, convex mirrors start appearing in paintings, particularly those produced in Germany and Flanders, where mirror making was really flourishing at this date. So perhaps the most famous convex mirror of all is represented in the Jan van Eyck's the Arnolfini Portrait, which you're all familiar with, and it's at the National Gallery. So it was painted while van Eyck was living in the Flemish city of Bruges, and we can see that the entire room here is reflected in a convex mirror which is hanging on the back wall. It's been suggested that the figure in red is van Eyck himself, also supported by the fact that on the wall in the back of the painting we can see Jan van Eyck's signature roughly translated as Jan van Eyck was here 1434. Interestingly, I also read that the mirror itself is much larger than a mirror could have actually been made at this time. So van Eyck is actually using a bit of artistic licence here. But the reflection itself is very accurate. Just drawing it back to our exhibition, I just wanted to put this in. So, this is one of the paintings that you'll be able to see in the final room. It's by Roestraten and it's a Vanitas, but these orbs, which you see here, this is a glass orb, were made using exactly the same process that complex mirrors were produced using. So it was a glass ball and it was filled with a lead sort of composite. I've got a detail here. This painting was one of the paintings that received full treatment for the exhibition so it went into conservation, and it had a slight darkened yellow varnish on it and when the varnish was removed it exposed this fantastic reflection. I don’t know if you can see it on this slide but you've got the artist here, the easel and then a window and a sort of row of paintings here and then the Vanitas scene in the foreground. While reading and researching for this exhibition this image came up more than any other in this history of self-portraiture, so it's an illustration taken from a French translation of Boccaccio's Concerning Famous Women, and it's the earliest known image of an artist producing a self-portrait using a mirror. so in his text Boccaccio records a story first recorded by Pliny the Elder, of Iaia of Cyzicus, who had apparently painted a portrait of herself, executed with the aid of a mirror. In Boccaccio's version of this the figure of Iaia has been replaced by the figure of Marcia. But what we see here is that the mirror in question, you might not be able to see it because it's not hugely enlarged here but it's actually a convex mirror, but what this tells us is that artists before 1500 were able to produce self-portraits but they had to correct the distortions produced by the convex mirror, which is what we can see is happening here. Really lovely, and in contrast to this, Parmigianino, in this remarkable self portrait of around 1524, makes no attempt to correct the distortions of the convex mirror from which he was working. And we know from Versari that he was working from a convex mirror and Versari records that it's a barber's mirror, or the type of mirror used by a barber.