The Full-Length Mirror: A Global Visual History - Hardcover

by Wu Hung (Author)

Beautifully illustrated, a stirring and wide-ranging reflection on art, technology, culture--and the full-length mirror.

This book tells two stories about the full-length mirror. One story, through time and space, crisscrosses the globe to introduce a broad range of historical actors: kings and slaves, artists and writers, merchants and craftsmen, courtesans, and commoners. The other story explores the connections among objects, painting, and photography, the full-length mirror providing a new perspective on historical artifacts and their images in art and visual culture. The Full-Length Mirror represents a new kind of global art history in which "global" is understood in terms of both geography and visual medium, a history encompassing Europe, Asia, and North America, and spanning over two millennia from the fourth century BCE to the early twentieth century.

Author Biography

Wu Hung is the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. His many books include A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture and Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China, both also published by Reaktion Books.