On Reflection by Jonathan Miller National Gallery Publication £25 in UK
A few weeks ago Lewis Wolpert devoted his weekly science column in the London In- dependent on Sunday to a quiz. The first question was why right and left are reversed in a mirror image, but not up and down. Left and right, he explained, have no intrinsic meaning but are defined with respect to up and down, back and front. The latter axis is reversed when you look in a mirror. I'm glad he cleared that up, because I had spent quite a while trying to decipher Jonathan Miller's much more protracted account of the same phenomenon - with diagrams - in On Reflection, and got nowhere. The good Doctor is charming, erudite, entertaining and likeable, but clear he ain't. On Reflection ponders, but does not greatly elucidate, the mysteries of representations of "glimmer, gleam, glitter, sheen and shine . . . mirrors and reflection in general", an agenda that allows him an endlessly discursive stroll through nine centuries of painting, drawing and print-making plus, latterly, photography. The result is a sumptuous, beautifully illustrated book, one that, thanks in no small measure to its designer, Chloe Alexander, is a delight to browse through.
Familiar masterpieces, such as one of Rembrandt's best self-portraits and Velasquez's Rokeby Venus, share the page with more obscure but equally engrossing works, including Johann Erdmann Hummel's 19th-century realist tour-de-force, The Polishing of the Granite Bowl, or Christopher Wilhelm Eckersberg's Woman Standing in Front of a Mirror. Thematic clusters of illustrations are particularly good, like those tracing the sliding scale of mirror iconography from innocent self-recognition to preening self-regard.
Among the nuggets of information we glean along the way are the fact that chimpanzees are the only animals who share with us the ability to recognise themselves in a mirror; that Narcissus dim-wittedly lacked this capacity; and that seeing isn't necessarily believing because perception involves, at an unconscious level, the routine juggling of possibilities as to what things are really like.
On Reflection is published to accompany the exhibition Mirror Image, which runs at the National Gallery in London until December 13th