Yami the Goddess and Mirror Tortoises

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Ardhanarishvara, Hinduism, Mahavidya, Nepal, sculpture, Taj Mahal, vermilion, Yami, Yamuna

My old posting about bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara and his mirror remains to be my only adventure into another, non-European cultural territories so far. I had ambitious plans to write more about ‘other’ mirrors too, but the European art history alone provides an enormous amount of materials (and I constantly discover more, and new layers in it). 

So, when I came across this Nepali statue, of woman with a mirror in her left hand, it looked like a good chance to double my cross-cultural exposure. The small, 12.5 cm tall ivory-carved figurine depicts the Indian goddess Yamuna, or Yami.

Domesticated Mirrors of François Boucher

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François Boucher, François Lemoyne, Jean-François Cars

In many postings in this blog (120 already, wow! -> proud of myself!) I told about the mirrors in artworks spanning across almost ten past centuries, from 12th to 21st. Only one century remained an orphan child, But why should it be? stroken me a thought, and I decided to write something about the mirrors and of the eighteenth century, too. And then why not about the mirrors of François Boucher, whose life covers nearly two thirds of the century (1703-1770)?

In the context of my mirror stories the total duration of his (art) life is not so  interesting, perhaps, but the large number of artworks with mirrors is, especially because of their diversity and sometimes subjects placed next to the mirrors.

Mirror of the Master of Death

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manuscript, Remiet Perrin

I was asked recently, by one of the readers of my Russian version of this blog, to inform them in advance about the coming postings:

“If I’d know a theme of scheduled posting, I would better prepare, read some stuff beforehand; otherwise I always come unprepared; wow, what a new world!” [this is not an exact translation, but more of a paraphrasing]

I have a forking point in reacting to such comment: one possible direction is that even if would have any ‘plans’ of postings, I’d rather *not* share them, because it would spoil the pleasure of these mini-discoveries I am making (and then describing in my postings). But that’s a fairly hypothetical version.

Second, and much more realistic one is that I don’t have any ‘plan’, or ‘program’ for the postings here, they somehow self-emerge, as if ‘out of nowhere, often surprising myself. This is, for example, exactly the case with this particular posting, about the Mirror of Master of Death, whom I know nothing about as later as this morning.

Roy Lichtenstein, Master of Fictitious Mirrors

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Bob Kessel, pop-art, Roy Lichtenstein

This posting happened to be “unexpected”, too; but in a different way that the one on Delvaux. This time I was sent, via i_shmael, a ‘gift’ of some sort, a few  photographs from the  Tate Modern in London that currently hosts a large exhibition by  Roy Lichtenstein. Well, on that occasion why not write a posting, then, about him, and his mirrors?  Here it is, with the dedication to the gift-giver, and also with thanks to  i_shmael.

The picture above is not by Roy Lichtenstein himself; it’s his portrait by Bob Kessel,  an American artist who specializes in taking somebody else’s paintings and distilling the to the very essence. 

Looks like the very essence of Lichtenstein is his own reflection in the mirror looking at himself.

Paul Delvaux and Melancholic Nudity of his Mirror Worlds

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André Breton, Paul Delvaux

This is one of those ‘long-planned, but unexpectedly written’, postings. I was actually planning to do something else today (to continue my story about Amish Kapoor’s mirrors, to be precise); alas, one of the ‘life enforcing’ events occurred.

For some of my mirror investigations I am borrowing books about art (history) from a local library. And sometimes comes the day when I can’t prolong them any further and *must*  bring them back – which also means the beginning of somewhat feverish scanning activities, which are seldom followed by comparable writing activities.  Which in why I have accumulated a large amount of the picture sets in my Flickr (for example, on Bonnard, or Balthus, or Breytner – to name just a few) that resulted in no postings so far. I decided to stop such a procrastination practice, and instead ‘shoot straight from the hip’, even with a risk missing (the point).

And so this posting about Paul Delvaux.

Him, Too? Mirror(s) of the Hours of Catherine of Cleves

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Book of Hours, Catherine of Cleves, illumination, manuscript

This one could be very short posting: here’s a scene of the birth of St. Mary (she is tightly wrapped, yet with a halo), and here’s the mirror (convex, on a wall, next to the window.

The’ve been a lot of such scenes already in this blog, both in the paintings, and in the manuscripts (one, two, three, and those are only the most recent one). This particular illumination will not reveal more details in this theme.

But the manuscript itself did reveal a number of new dimensions in my mirror games, so it seems to be worth a scribble posting.

Amish Mirror Kapoor

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Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate

Somewhat unexpectedly (but pleasantly unexpectedly) we now have relatives living in  in Chicago, so getting a post card like the above becomes inevitable from some moment. It seems that the folks from Chicago feel obliged to send a picture of their famous mirror mushroom (otherwise known as the Cloud Gate) to everybody in the world.

In a way, writing about the mirrors of Anish Kapoor was also inevitable for this blog. Kapoor have already created  so many of them, and many of them are so bizarre (and bizarrely beautiful), so it would be a shame to pass by. On the other hand, he indeed created SO many of them, that it’s very difficult to event start the writing, since the task seems insurmountable, at least in the scope of one posting (I tried to start once, but quickly give up) . And bear in mind, he keeps making more and more of them, non stop!

Therefore I decided to ‘split’ Kapoor into a few feasible chunks; so far it looks that the ‘Kapoor’ series will have three parts:

Between the Comb and the Mirror

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Agostino Veneziano, Albrecht Dürer, Bartholomeus Spranger, Charybdis, John Melhuish Strudwick, melusine, Peter Vischer, Scylla

Attentive readers of this blog will immediately recognize this creature – she is of course a melusine!  And they will be wrong.

Or more correctly, they may be somewhat right, because this woman-like creature with froggy feet and a spiraling tail can indeed be a melusine, either not yet met by her king in the woods, or already fled from him. But in any case we know that the author wanted to say something else with this picture.

Here is the full context of the above de-tail:

The Tale of Two Tails, or the Mirror & Melusine

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melusine, mermaid

Apparently, my previous posting, about mermaids and their mirrors, wasn’t particularly liked by the forces of water; just as I finished it, we had a mini-flood in the house, not as large as the Noah’s one, but enough to occupy us for half a day sorting out the mess. I can’t even imagine what they will throw on us after my story about melusines!

Paris Bordone: In Search of Mirrors

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Paris Bordone

The way how female body is depicted in the portraits of Paris Bordone can be compared to striptease mirror/poker of some kind; only the game lasted a life. There are no cards here, of course (and the mirrors are to find, too), but the striptease, at least of some sort, did occur.

The portraits above are of the fully dressed ladies, including their necklines, or décolletages. They are covered by the luxurious pieces, called partlets (the website tells about various designs of this important detail of the Venetian women’s dresses of the High Renaissance age, and a simple image search will reveal a wide diversity of modern reincarnations  of this detail).