Chapter 2 Matter as a Mirror: Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance ...

Matter as a Mirror 99
Mirrors as Containers: Some Early Modern Cultural History
It is fascinating to notice that the idea of a transformation from passive object
into active subject in the mirror (so prominent in Ficino’s emanationist
concepts) is here transferred onto ordinary, material mirrors. Yet, Ficino was
not alone in using this complex of ideas: accounts of the amazing capacities of
mirrors were very common in medieval and Renaissance texts and in certain
cultural practices. The following detour into some of the more common assumptions
about mirrors in Ficino’s time will confirm the idea that mirrors
in general have the capacity to catch the reflection of a form in a particularly
magical context. Instead of being a mere image of deception or degradation,
the mirror may also focus and enhance light, thus acting as a screen that receives
and eventually itself becomes creative.
The mirror’s capacity to enhance the force of light, which at first
might seem to the modern reader to be a simple confusion between plain
mirrors and burning glasses, turns out to be actually founded in a theory that
conflates the concepts of mirror image refection and procreation. 158 In his
writings Ficino mentions several types of mirrors. For example, he uses the
metal mirror with a polished surface, which produces rather faint and dark
images, to illustrate the concept of gradual deterioration in the hypostatic
mirrors discussed above. 159 Apart from the burning glass that focuses and enhances
solar power and is conductive to the idea that light once captured in
the mirror reinvigorates again, Ficino also mentions other concave reflecting
surfaces, each of which distorts the original image and produces a different
and deceptive image. The mirror with a plain surface, for instance, gives forth
side inverted images, whereas a concave but oblong mirror gives forth upside
down images. 160 In the latter case, Ficino could also be referring to a long tra-
158 For an example of mirrors as burning glasses in Ficino see De vita III, 26: 332:
“Figura speculi lenis, concava, nitens, coelo congrua ob hoc ipsum proprie munus tantum
coelitus accipit, ut radios Phoebi in se cumulatissime complectantur, et solidissimum quodque
ad centrum suum e conspectu locatum repente comburat.”
159 On the metal mirror which renders deteriorated images, see Plutarch (1927–1969)
404D; 521B who says that mirrors only eidola of reality appear.
160 In Timaeum def. 40, OO 1473–1474: “Differentes autem apparitiones ex differentiis
speculorum, & aspectus situsque contingunt: In speculo plano dextrae partes imagines,
sinistris nostris respondent, sinistrae vero dextris marginis. Ac si speculum formam
imbricis habeat eminentes utraeque eius imaginis utrinque transmutant […] Verum
si oblongum marginibus eminentibus speculum sit per obliquum, ita nobis expositum,