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The Technology of Reflection: Renaissance Mirrors of Steel and Glass

In 1576, just a few years after the newly invented crystal glass pocket mirror was first available as a novelty import in England, George Gascoigne published a verse satire conspicuously titled The Steele Glas. The poem is an estates satire for the sixteenth century and as such levels its invective on all of society. Yet as its title indicates, the poem orchestrates its censure around a single paradigmatic object, the crystal glass mirror. In everything from its manufacture to its exchange to its use, the crystal glass mirror signals social and material changes that contravene the modes of production and signification that Gascoigne identifies with the traditional steel glass. The crystal glass mirrors that Gascoigne bemoans were not the first mirrors made from glass, but they were the first that rivaled steel “glasses” made entirely of alloyed metal. Convex glass mirrors had been produced in Germany and Holland and exported to England as early as the fourteenth century. These convex or pennyware mirrors were made from forest glass— a thick and slightly greenish-tinted glass—that was blown into globes and lined with lead. Pennyware mirrors needed no maintenance, whereas steel mirrors, because they oxidize with exposure to air, required regular polishing.1 But the convex surface of the mirror did considerably distort the proportions of its reflection. Although convex mirrors were relatively inexpensive, the majority of mirrors imported and sold in England, well into the sixteenth century, were steel and silver mirrors. Before the introduction of the crystal glass mirror, high quality steel glasses seem to have been preferred over convex glass mirrors.2 The crystal glass mirror was the product of two distinct innovations: a perfectly clear glass and a light metal tain. In 1500, Flemish mirror makers developed a new process for silvering the glass of convex mirrors, using an alloy of quicksilver and tin rather than lead. The new tain of quick-