





In 1433, artist Jan van Eyck invented an entirely new genre of painting while sitting quietly in his studio in Bruges. He did it with the help of a scientific breakthrough which allowed German engineers to create some of the world's first high-quality mirrors. The new German mirrors were made by coating glass with an amalgam of tin and mercury. Reflections in these mirrors were sharper than anything the world had ever seen, and they led to van Eyck's crazy idea to create a self-portrait.

Over the next century, as the Renaissance blossomed with experimentation in science and art in Europe, self-portraits became a kind of craze. Albrecht Dürer, artist and mathematician, is famous for a series of self-portraits he created in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. By the 19th and 20th centuries, artists like Vincent van Gogh and Frida Kahlo were creating surreal and abstract self-portraits to express intense emotions. In a sense, argues University of Bamburg cognitive scientist Claus-Christian Carbon, they were anticipating today's selfies, in which people use filters and props to convey a feeling.

Carbon is the author of an intriguing new study about how the selfie is actually part of a 500-year history of self-portraiture that grows out of technological advancement—and the enduring human need to be seen as the people we wish we were. He points out that even Dürer's early self-portraits are full of tweaks that the artist's contemporaries would have recognized as signs of wealth, such as a fur collar reserved for members of the social elite. Interestingly, when Dürer painted himself with this collar in 1500, it was a few years before he was granted a social position that would have allowed him to wear that collar publicly. So painting himself with the collar was a kind of boast, similar to what you see in selfies of people showing off their expensive possessions.

Self-portraits that contain symbolic images or distorted facial expressions aim to capture how the artist feels at a specific moment in time. Also, argues Carbon, these portraits aim to enlist the sympathy of the viewer. Perhaps that's why one of Frida Kahlo's most well-known self-portraits shows the artist with a necklace of thorns, her shoulders flanked by a black monkey and a black cat. Today, she might have used a Snapchat filter to convey the same message of transcendence and suffering.

Obviously what separates historical self-portraits from selfies is the amount of time and money required to make them. Four centuries ago, a self-portrait might take months and require expensive painting supplies. Even 150 years ago, a camera self-portrait would have taken a while (exposures often took ten minutes), and the equipment to do it was not always easy to get. Plus, early camera selfies like the daguerreotype taken by Robert Cornelius in 1839 required hours upon hours of costly experimentation; after all, it was impossible to see exactly what would end up in the frame while posing in front of the camera.

Another technological revolution was required to usher in today's era of selfies. Front-view cameras on phones finally made self-portraiture into something anyone could do in a few seconds. And yet, Carbon muses, the same basic psychological need informs Kahlo's work and the most artless selfie. They are, he writes, a way of conveying selfhood using "a mixture of concreteness and imagination." All self-representations, he argues, are "enhanced" in order to sum up complex feelings in a single image. In a sense, the Snapchat-altered image is just an updated version of what Renaissance painters were doing 500 years ago, when they peered into mirrors and decided to make images of themselves that went beyond mere reflection.

Listing image by via Maria Thereza Soares