The Full-Length Mirror

Explores the full-length mirror through history, as well as in material culture.

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This book tells two stories about the full-length mirror. One story, through time and space, crisscrosses the globe to introduce a broad range of historical actors: kings and slaves, artists and writers, merchants and craftsmen, courtesans and commoners. The other story explores the connections between object, painting and photography, the full-length mirror providing a new perspective on historical artefacts and their images in art and visual culture.
The Full-Length Mirror represents a new kind of global art history in which ‘global’ is understood in terms of both geography and visual medium, a history encompassing Europe, Asia and North America, and spanning over two millennia from the fourth century BCE to the early twentieth century.