The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art

by Arnaud Maillet, Jeff Fort (Translator)

Overview

In this first full-length study of a largely forgotten optical device from the eighteenth century, Arnaud Maillet reconfigures our historical understanding of visual experience and meaning in relation to notions of opacity, transparency, and imagination. Many are familiar with the Claude glass as a small black convex mirror used by artists and spectators of landscape to reflect a view and make tonal values and areas of light and shade visible.

In a groundbreaking account, Maillet goes well beyond this particular function of the glass and situates it within a richer archaeology of Western thought, exploring the uncertainties and anxieties about mirrors, reflections, and their potential distortions. He takes us from the magical and occult background of the “black mirror,” through a full evaluation of its importance in the age of the picturesque, to its persistence in a range of technological and representational practices, including photography, film, and contemporary art. The Claude Glass is a lasting contribution to the history of Western visual culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781890951481
Publisher:	Zone Books
Publication date:	04/17/2009
Series:	Zone Books
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Arnaud Maillet is an art historian who received his doctorate at the University of Paris I. The Claude Glass is his first book.

Editorial Reviews

"[A] rigorously researched and richly suggestive book… . In Maillet’s skillful and endlessly intriguing account, the whole of Western art, for some centuries, seems plausibly to have been seduced by the notion if not the reality, of seeing through a glass, darkly."

Modern Painters

Art historian Maillet's in-depth, groundbreaking study focuses on the rare tools used by artists, magicians, and conjurers since the 18th century in Europe known as the Claude Glass and Claude Mirror. They were named for French landscape painter Claude Lorraine because of the golden effects produced in his paintings, although, ironically, no one knows for sure if he ever used them. The Claude Mirror's reflection framed a scene for painters and, more recently, photographers to contemplate, stage, and copy, as well as to check the color and form of a work in progress. Maillet covers the many facets of the tools from history, use, and definition to scientific and optical aspects to stranger and mystical associations with the occult, diviners, and demonology. Finally, he discusses how the eye sees and judges its relationship to the world, art, and visions. There are 36 black-and-white illustrations throughout. VERDICT This is essential reading for painters and artists; strongly recommended for academics, specialists, and students for its original, fully documented scholarship and contribution to art history on a rarely covered subject.—Ellen Bates, New York

Library Journal

"This sustained examination of an instrument so integral to the history of Romantic esthetics, and yet so neglected, is a valuable and important work."

Times Literary Supplement

This sustained examination of an instrument so integral to the history of Romantic esthetics, and yet so neglected, is a valuable and important work.

—Library Journal

From the Publisher

This sustained examination of an instrument so integral to the history of Romantic esthetics, and yet so neglected, is a valuable and important work.

—Library Journal

Reviews