The first glass mirrors, appearing in the Neolithic period in Turkey, Central America, and other places at least as far back as 6000 BCE, consisted of obsidian, a naturally occurring black glass. When this material was honed carefully into a flat, polished surface, it provided a dark and haunting vision of the self. In the Roman era, man-made glass was extensively developed within a huge industry that spanned the Empire. Despite devising a myriad of sophisticated techniques, it appears that the Romans, experimenting with glass and lead, were only able to produce very small crude mirrors.

Over seven thousand years after the invention of the first obsidian mirror, the next technical development in glass mirror-making finally emerged just before the Renaissance during the resurgence of the glass industry in the West. By the fourteenth century CE, convex mirrors of relatively clear glass and significant in scale began to be made in a variety of European locations. Like the centrally placed mirror in Jan Van Eyck’s Wedding Portrait (1434), the convex mirror cast the viewer in an encompassing but distorted view of reality.

Following the fall of the Roman Empire and its network of glass factories, the ability to make high-quality clear glass had been generally lost to the West. The skill was only reintroduced by the Venetians, who may have acquired it from slaves brought back from trading forays to Syria, where the knowledge had been retained from the early Roman Empire and continually nurtured during the European dark ages. During the sixteenth century, inhabitants of the Venetian island of Murano, used their famous “cristallo” glass recipe (which provided an adequately transparent material) to perfect a technique of mirror making that involved applying an amalgam of tin and mercury to the back of a smooth sheet of glass. By 1600, they were able to produce a relatively large, flat expanse of very clear glass that reflected the “objective” view of the body still so captivating today. What followed were a hundred years of espionage and failed attempts by other nations as they tried to imitate the Venetian method.