Through the looking glass

Little is more alluring than a mirror, its glittering reflection at once a symbol of vanity, palatial splendour and human ingenuity. Matthew Dennison charts its history from polished obsidian to decorative furnishing of unrivalled glamour

- Matthew Dennison

PERHAPS she is preparing to be married. Behind her, a maidservant holds out a necklace to place around her throat, another presents a casket containing cosmetics or additional pieces of jewellery—and above her is a hand mirror, a bright pale circle smaller than the young woman’s face. This scene, dating from the 5th century BC, appears on a painted terracotta cosmetics box, or pyxis, now in the collection of the British Museum. An almost identical hand mirror, held by another seated young woman, is seen on a painted vase of similar date in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece. Much in both images points to the status of the two women, most of all their possession of mirrors, which were costly and highly coveted. Two thousand years previously, the funerary commemoration of the wife of a newly rich magnate in Old Kingdom Egypt had acclaimed a ‘woman who previously looked at her face in the water’ but ‘now has a bronze mirror’.

Mirrors have existed since prehistory, made from obsidian, a naturally occurring volcanic glass characterised when polished by its crystalline black reflectiveness, or from polished bronze, copper and silver. Dramatic- ally, ancient storytelling captured the hypnotic, compulsive qualities of reflected images. In Ovid’s version of the myth of Narcissus, Nemesis punished the handsome youth by causing him to fall in love with his own (unrecognised) reflection in still water. Lovelorn and unable to tear himself away, he sat at the water’s edge and pined away to death.