In René Magritte's 1937 painting La Reproduction Interdite — roughly "depiction prohibited," or "depiction impossible" — a man stands before a mirror and sees the back of his own head.
Artists have been putting trick mirrors into paintings for about 600 years. The Escher in Het Paleis museum in The Hague has an essay tracing the tradition — from Jan van Eyck's 1434 Arnolfini Portrait, where a small convex mirror behind the couple captures the room from the painter's vantage, to Parmigianino's 1524 self-portrait, painted on a curved wooden panel to replicate a convex mirror's distortion.
The 17th-century Flemish still-life painter Clara Peeters embedded tiny self-portraits in the curved surfaces of goblets, jar lids, and pewter pitchers — hidden reflections the viewer has to hunt for.
M.C. Escher's Hand with Reflecting Sphere and Three Spheres II put him inside the image, distorted by the very surface he's depicting. In Still Life with Spherical Mirror, studio objects fill the scene — an open newspaper, a closed book, a simurg (a Persian mythological bird he returned to repeatedly) — while the sphere captures him and the full room in its reflection.
In his 1946 mezzotint Eye, a skull stares back from the pupil.
[Via Lynn Cherny's Things I Think Are Awesome.]
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