On Reflection

by Jonathan Miller

In this beautiful book, Jonathan Miller describes our perceptual capacity to recognize real-life mirrors as well as those in pictures, a complex psychological process of which we are usually unaware. He does so by investigating the pictorial representation of sheen, shine, glimmer, and gleam through a wonderfully varied selection of paintings and photographs drawn from the National Gallery, London, and other international collections. With excitement and innovation, Miller provides a guide to reflecting on reflections, enhancing the reader's enjoyment both of everyday life and of visual art.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Mirror Image: Jonathan Miller on Reflection held in London in 1998.

Genres: Art

224 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1998

About the author

Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE was a British theatre and opera director, author, television presenter, humorist and sculptor. Trained as a physician in the late 1950s, he first came to prominence in the 1960s with his role in the comedy review Beyond the Fringe with fellow writers and performers Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. Despite having seen few operas and not knowing how to read music, he began stage-directing them in the 1970s and became one of the world's leading opera directors with several classic productions to his credit. His best-known production is probably his 1982 "Mafia"-styled Rigoletto set in 1950s Little Italy, Manhattan. He was also a well-known television personality and familiar public intellectual in the UK and US.

Reviews

[Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, long before reflectoporn on EBay and selfies on Facebook, artists used mirrors and other reflective surfaces to paint self portraits and create other interesting visual effects. This reproduces the well-known Arnolfini Marriage and The Moneychanger and His Wife, but also less famous paintings as well as photographs by Diane Arbus, André Kertész, Clementina Hawarden, and others.

The reason that there was so little commentary about the art as art, rather than as a depiction of natural and perceptual phenomena, became clear when I got to the author's bio and saw that he was a physician.

It did some things very well — I could count the number of awkward mid-sentence page breaks on one hand. But it was somewhat difficult to identify the works reproduced by title and author — putting this info in small vertical text is an efficient use of space, but a little hard to read.

(The following is not actually a spoiler — just some journal articles cited in the bibliography that I might look up sometime.)


The Tools of Venus, Renaissance Studies, 11(3), 1997. (C. Santore)

Light, Form, and Texture in XVth Century Painting, J of the Royal Society of Arts, 1964, 862-49

The Mystical Window in Paintings of the Salvator Mundi, Gazette des Beaux Arts, VI / LVI, 1960. auth C. Gottlieb

The Difference Between Right and Left, American Philosophical Quarterly, VII (3), 1970, 175-191.

Why do mirrors reverse right/left but not up/down, J Philosophy, LXXI, 1974.

Self-Perception as a Foundation for Self-Knowledge, Psychological Inquiry, 3(2), 1992, 134-6.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was fascinating. It was published to coincide with a British exhibit called "Mirror Image." Although I didn't know a lot of the artistic terminology used (art history 101 was a long time ago), I still enjoyed the book. The artwork featured in it was great and the commentary very helpful.

[Stephen W · Rating 1 out of 5]

Coffee table art