Famous mirror paintings include Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (1434), Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656) and Manet's A Bar at the Folies Bergère (1882).
A painting shows one side of a scene. A mirror lets the painter show the other side: the back of a head, the door behind the viewer, a hidden face. For more than five centuries, painters have used that trick to slip a king, a patron or themselves into pictures where they had no place.
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How These Were Chosen
This list counts down from number 12 to number 1. Every picture on it puts a mirror inside the scene, and that brings a technical problem for the painter: the glass has to look like glass, with a frame and a sheen, and not like a window cut into the wall.
The object also came loaded with meaning. In allegories, pictures where a figure stands for an idea, Truth held one because a mirror shows things as they are, and Prudence held one because knowing oneself was the first step to wisdom.
The same object could just as easily mean vanity: a woman admiring herself in the glass. On this list, though, the reflection usually turns toward someone outside the scene, the painter, a visitor or whoever stands in front of the canvas.
12. Georges de La Tour, The Repentant Magdalen (about 1635 to 1640)
On the table in The Repentant Magdalen lie a book and a human skull, and a small mirror shows the skull a second time. A young woman sits beside the table in profile, in a dark room, her left hand touching the skull. The French painter Georges de La Tour made the canvas between about 1635 and 1640.
The woman is Mary Magdalene, the follower of Jesus whom the Catholic Church of the 1600s held up as the model of the repentant sinner. La Tour painted her several times and often gave her the same few props: a mirror, a skull, a candle.
Each prop carries part of her story. The skull stands for death, the candle for a life that burns down, and the mirror for the beauty and vanity she has given up. Here the candle, mostly hidden behind the skull, lights both the bone and its reflection.
Painters called such reminders vanitas, after the Latin word for emptiness: images reminding whoever looks at them that life passes and beauty with it.
At a Glance
Artist: Georges de La Tour (1593 to 1652)
Painted: About 1635 to 1640
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 113 × 92.7 cm (44.5 × 36.5 in)
Where to see it: National Gallery of Art, Washington
11. Berthe Morisot, The Psyche Mirror (1876)
The Psyche Mirror shows a young woman getting dressed in front of a tall glass. The Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot made the picture in 1876, in front of her own psyché, the French name for a full length dressing mirror. Hers was in the Empire style, the fashion of Napoleon's reign.
A woman adjusting her blouse was hardly a grand subject. Yet when the canvas was exhibited in Paris the next year, one of the most famous novelists in France picked it out.