This essay is a hermeneutic investigation into a "mirror mode of looking," which the author defines as a strategy of semiotic representation inherited by Manet from a host of predecessors, including Van Eyck, Titian, Velázquez, Steen, Vermeer, and Watteau. It is proposed that the early historical precedence of a "mirror mode" in realist painting calls for a new, multivalent reading of the praxis of mimesis (and its public reception) in the premodern era. In turn, the subjective visuality of nineteenth-century modernism signals perhaps not so radical a departure from a former "ocularcentric regime" than is commonly presumed.
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