The Moral Mirror of Roman Art (review)

Publishers are invited to submit new books to be reviewed to Professor David Sider, Department of Classics, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Room 503, New York, NY 10003; e-mail: david.sider@nyu.edu.

Despite its illusory subject, this interdisciplinary study firmly seizes the mirror as a polyvalent symbol in Roman art and literature with equal mastery in both areas. Taylor’s acute synthesis of art and text augments recent interest in the gaze and illusion in Roman literary and philosophical works (e.g., Hardie 2002, Bartsch 2006), adding a much needed visual dimension to this cultural discourse. While some overlap with Bartsch is inevitable, especially in the discussions of ethical mirrors in Seneca and the figure of Narcissus, Taylor’s focus on the mirror itself as object, image, and metaphorical vehicle yields fresh insights. Employing a variety of approaches as heterogenous as his Roman materials, Taylor defines the mirror’s semiotic power in five alliterative terms: “magical,” “metamorphic,” “metaphorical,” “magnetic,” and “moral” (7–8). Taylor links these qualities to the mirror’s quintessential object of reflection: the self. In Roman culture, a mirror is never “just there,” nor is a reflection ever noted unless observed; Taylor’s detailed readings of Roman wall painting and other images effectively establish this point.

The Introduction clearly sets out Taylor’s themes and methodologies, which range from the archaeological (on the history of ancient mirror manufacture) to French structuralist (Vernant and Frontisi-Ducroux are well represented). Like Bartsch, Taylor eschews Lacanian psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic, a strategy that accords well with his historically informed and materially grounded readings, even offering an appendix refuting the conflation in contemporary theory of Medusa’s gaze with the “evil eye.” Taylor thus emphasizes the Roman viewer as a historically specific and culturally bounded consciousness, though with caveats (17–18). Across this cultural gulf, however, Taylor establishes viewing paradigms such as the “flexed gaze,” an iconographic motif of protagonist and reflection whose gazes intersect to implicate the viewer. This “conscious breach of the ‘fourth wall’” (38) is a pictorial analogue to poetic strategies that produce literary self-consciousness, and enriches Taylor’s complex readings of visual imagery. The first two chapters on the mirror as a gendered tool for self-reflection and Narcissus and Hermaphroditus tread relatively familiar cultural ground while making strong localized contributions: “The Mirror of Venus” (39–47) tracks an iconographic trope in the Roman world, the transformation of a Hellenistic mirror-bearing “Venus-at-toilette” into the popular Roman “Venus Triumphans” (2nd century b.c.e.–late antiquity), enthroned in a marine thiasos but still coyly engaged in her “flexed gaze.” Adducing the ideology of the Roman triumph, Taylor interprets the image as the iconographic apotheosis of Roman femininity: the goddess’ dramatically public act of self-beautification “expresses the constricted, solipsistic ideal of femininity that prevailed throughout the Roman world” (46). The fluidity of the mirror’s associations inspires an intriguing analysis of Venus’ other visual attributes, the dove and the partridge, and their behaviors with reflective surfaces in ancient natural histories. Taylor’s talent for tracing patterns of signification is well illustrated by his rich trove of material evidence.

The interdisciplinary approach of his studies yields the greatest insights in chapter 3, “The Mirror of Dionysus.” Identifying visual traces of the enigmatic Orphic rituals will inevitably be speculative, given the sketchiness of the sources. Taylor brilliantly uses Orphic texts to decode the iconography of Dionysiac beliefs (including the famous paintings in the Villa of the Mysteries), which in turn produces attractive hypotheses on the rituals themselves. The mirror is established as central to the religion’s myths and practice: in Orphic aetiology the child Zagreus was enticed to his death by a mirror, and extrapolating from careful interpretation of Dionysiac images, Taylor boldly suggests the mirror’s use in catoptromancy (summoning visions of the beyond). Mirrors could both symbolize and effect the Dionysiac initiate’s goal of epiphany, “the sudden, often terrifying appearance...