the human soul. Set against the trope of painting as a metaphor for the
logical, rational method of knowledge identified as Greek, the mirror
becomes the space in which the real, deceptively diminished in its painted
re-presentation, shines in its true ephemerality.
Similarly, for Plotinus, in moving beyond the limited realities of nature
and reflecting the ideal, the arts can enhance reality in reflecting the ideal
beyond the actual realization of the ideal in nature, which is already the
simulacrum of the ideal.^19 This does not happen through the materiality of
the work, but through the affective experience of the artist who, in making
an ideal, realizes what is already present within himself:
Suppose two blocks of stone lying side by side: one is unpatterned, quite untouched
by art; the other has been minutely wrought by the craftsman’s hands into some
statue of god or man, a Grace or a Muse, or of a human being, not a portrait but a
creation in which the sculptor’s art has concentrated all loveliness.
Now it must be seen that the stone thus brought under the artist’s hand to the
beauty of form is beautiful not as stone–for so the crude block would be as
pleasant–but in virtue of the Form or Idea introduced by the art. This form is not
in the material; it is in the designer before it ever enters the stone; and the artificer
holds it not by his equipment of eyes and hands but by his participation in his art.
The beauty, therefore, exists in a far higher state in the art; for it does not come over
integrally into the work; that original beauty is not transferred; what comes over is
a derivative and a minor: and even that shows itself upon the statue not integrally
and with entire realization of intention but only in so far as it has subdued the
resistance of the material.^20
Much as Plotinus’artist brings forth a perfection not in the object, but in
his own being, al-Ghazali’s Chinese artists achieve higher realism than
those of Rum through polishing what already exists in themselves. The wall
represents perception already inscribed within their hearts.
As with the medium of music, here mimesis occurs not in the relation-
ship between the representation and the external painting or artwork, but
in the resonance between the real and the soul of the maker/receiver.
Although the story focuses on a king, his objective gaze does not represent
the subjectivity through which art functions. Rather, it is the one who, as in
Plotinus, brings forth the ideal through the resistant medium of stone; or as
in al-Ghazali, the one who reflects the ideal by polishing his own rusted
heart, who experiences the real. Art functions through its experiential
performativity rather than through a disengaged process of observation.
The relationship between the mirror and the Chinese artists of al-Ghazali’s(^19) Halliwell, 2002 : 317. (^20) Plotinus, 1991 : 410–411 (5.8.1).
138 Seeing through the Mirror