mirror

Latin mirare meant to look at, to gaze, to wonder at — it shares its root with mirabilis (marvelous) and mirus (wonderful), the same family that gives us miracle and admire. The original mirrors Romans used were polished metal discs — bronze, silver, occasionally gold — which returned a dim and slightly flattering reflection. The act of looking into one carried a connotation of self-examination, vanity examined, wonder at one's own face. Mirare gathered that weight.

Old French took the Latin verb and made it mirer — to look, to mirror, to aim — and from it created the noun mireor by the twelfth century, meaning a looking glass. English borrowed this as mirour or mirrour in the thirteenth century, and through normal attrition it settled into mirror by the sixteenth. The transition from polished metal to backed glass mirrors was already underway in Venice, where glassmakers on Murano had learned to apply a thin foil of tin and mercury to the back of flat glass, producing a reflection of unprecedented brightness and fidelity.

The Venetian mirror monopoly was one of the strangest industrial secrets in European history. The technique of backing glass with tin amalgam was guarded so jealously that Murano glassworkers were forbidden to leave the island under penalty of death. Louis XIV's finance minister Colbert, determined to break Venice's hold on the luxury trade, smuggled Murano craftsmen to France in the 1660s — the artisans received death threats from Venice's Council of Ten while installing the mirrors at Versailles. The Hall of Mirrors, seventeen arched windows opposite seventeen arched mirrors, was a geopolitical statement as much as an aesthetic one.

The chemistry of mirrors shifted again in 1835 when Justus von Liebig developed the silver mirror reaction — using silver nitrate reduced to a thin metallic film on glass — which made mirrors cheaper, brighter, and free of mercury toxicity. Modern mirrors use vacuum-deposited aluminum or silver on glass, an operation performed in near-vacuum chambers. The Latin wonder at one's own reflection now replicates itself in a manufacturing process more alien to Ovid's Narcissus than any myth could have predicted.