Book Launch: "The Mirror of Art"

The Mirror of Art: Painting & Reflection in Early Modern Visual Culture (Cambridge University Press) is the latest book by Genevieve Warwick.

What is a painting? An application of coloured pigments on a flat surface. My book poses this question in historical perspective to ask: what was a Renaissance painting understood to be? The answer is that Renaissance painting was conceived as a mirror-image of the visible world.

My book analyses the idea of the Renaissance mirror-image as it was argued in art theory, demonstrated in art practice, and represented in painting itself. It also studies the mirror-image as the optical instrument of early modern science. The different chapters of the book thereby offer a fully interdisciplinary analysis of the mirror as the method and metaphor of the visible field. This study recasts our understanding of inter-visual relationships between the painted image and Galilean science, in what literary scholars have termed Early Modernity’s ‘Mirror Age’.

Research for this book was generously supported by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2017-21). To find out more: https://cambridgeblog.org/2025/02/looking-in-the-mirror-of-early-modern-art/

The launch will be followed by a drinks reception.

This is a free event, which means we overbook to allow for no-shows and to avoid empty seats. While we generally do not have to turn people away, this does mean we cannot guarantee everyone a place. Admission is on a first come, first served basis.

Accessibility:

For in-person attendees, this event will take place at IASH, 2 Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9NW. Please see a map here: https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/location

The Seminar Room is on the first floor, and unfortunately IASH does not have a lift. If you have mobility issues and would like to discuss access, please contact iash@ed.ac.uk as soon as possible.

Biography:

Genevieve Warwick is a specialist in Renaissance and Early Modern visual culture, and currently a Nominated Fellow at IASH. She began her teaching career at the Courtauld Institute, then serving as Faculty and College Director of Research and Graduate Studies for Arts & Humanities. From 2012-17 she was Editor and Chair of Art History, the leading UK journal for the discipline. She was previously a Visiting Research Fellow at IASH in 2008.

In her field, Genevieve is author of 13 books including 5 monographs, exhibition catalogues, journal special issues, anthologies, and some 50 articles. Her new research analyses the Renaissance rise of landscape painting through the prism of environmental studies. To this end she was Guest Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich in Spring 2022, to situate her research within the larger frameworks of environmental history; subsequently furthered through a Visiting Professorship at the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies Florence in Spring 2025; and her current fellowship within Environmental Humanities at IASH.