Painting as a Mirror of Nature

Van Hoogstraten's comparison of a painting to ‘a mirror of Nature, which makes things seem to be that are not’, is probably the best-known quotation from the Inleyding. He holds that art ‘reflects the whole of nature’, calls it a ‘sister of reflexive Philosophy’ and describes the general tasks of painters in terms of ‘infinite reflections’. ¹ This mirror metaphor is not as simple as it may appear: it relates to the deceptive quality of the image produced by the painter. The positive appreciation of deception that sounds in the metaphor was developed primarily in the classical theory of rhetoric. Indeed, rhetoric derives its success ultimately not from a conclusive demonstration of proof but from its persuasiveness. In pursuit of persuasion, orators are even permitted to tell lies; Ficino clarifies this duplicity by noting that Mercury is the inventor of eloquence and of the lie. ² In the seventeenth century, artists and orators alike were presented as deceivers, for instance in a painting by Sebastiaan Vrancx of the Children of Mercury: a group including merchants, a quack, actors, a painter and a sculptor. Goltzius's print of the same subject depicts, besides the painter, sculptor and quack, a preaching cleric and a theatre in the background, while the foreground shows two orators debating (figs. 98 and 99). ³