Painters have always found reasons to paint the same person twice: a twin in a myth, a face in a mirror, a sister beside a sister. What holds the eye is the one detail that does not match. Here, a blind father checks his son's arm for goat hair, and a mirror refuses to show a man his own face.
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How These Were Chosen
A double is a figure that appears twice in the same picture. The story may supply it, since myths and the Bible are full of twins. The painter may also make it, with a mirror, a pool of water or the same face painted twice.
Either way, the eye goes from one figure to the other and starts comparing. That comparison is what the painter controls, by deciding what stays the same and what changes.
The rule for this list follows from that. Each work puts two versions of one person, or a pair of twins, inside one frame, and makes the likeness part of the story. The twelve run from the 1430s to the 1930s.
12. Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (1656)
Far back in the room, a small mirror on the rear wall shows two faces, a man and a woman. In front of it stand a little girl in a wide pale dress, two maids of honor bending toward her, a dog on the floor and, at the left, a painter beside a huge canvas whose front nobody can see. Diego Velázquez finished the picture in 1656.
The girl is the Infanta Margarita, and the faces in the mirror are her parents, the king and queen of Spain. For the reflection to make sense, they would have to stand outside the canvas, exactly where the viewer stands, posing for the picture the painter is working on.
The rulers of Spain are therefore present only as a copy, and a small one. The dog in the foreground covers far more canvas than both of them together, and I enjoy the idea of a dog outweighing a king.
Velázquez may have known an older painting built around the same kind of mirror. Number 11 on this list belonged to the Spanish royal collection and was seen in the Alcázar in 1599, though no document proves that he studied it.
At a Glance
Artist: Diego Velázquez (1599 to 1660)
Painted: 1656
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 320.3 × 279.1 cm (126 × 110 in)
Where to see it: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (Room 12)
11. Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait (1434)
Hand in hand, a man in a wide black hat and a woman in a green gown stand side by side. Jan van Eyck painted them in 1434, most likely Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, an Italian merchant based in Bruges, and his wife. On the wall behind them hangs a round convex mirror that repeats the whole room in miniature, and in the glass the room holds more people than the panel shows.