HOPERAPERTA

 Maurizio Barberis

L‘Armoire à Glace

In the form of a Foreword

Where do objects that are no longer needed go? From Giordano Bruno to Marcel Duchamp, with varying degrees of good fortune, they cease to be of use, to simply exist, to be, in the wardrobe of Memory, the Armoire à Glace.

How many of us retain memories of those old and cumbersome objects delegated to the preservation, or rather, the forgetting of things and impressions linked to our past. A sort of repository of lost forms, of shapes and images that belong to the subsoil of our memory. Images, in fact, which are no longer of any use for everyday life. Almost always accompanied, in the central door, by a large mirror acting as an implacable critic of our miserable appearance and our poor clothes. 
Now relegated to some attic of old country houses, where, like a new Alice, a curious child goes rummaging through the cavern of old memories, unaware of the dangers she might run into.
 Behind the wardrobe she might find a lion, but perhaps also a faun or a witch, or who knows what else, and she might lose herself in a world of arcane mysteries.                   

A mirror and a wardrobe, two truly bizarre objects to assemble into a single structure. Nonetheless, the Armoire à Glace was rampant in bourgeois homes throughout the 19th and most of the 20th century, providing poetic inspiration to prose writers and rhymeurs. A synthesis of opposites, since, unlike the wardrobe, the mirror retains nothing. The reflected image lasts less than the fraction of a second, and then passes into the memory of lost things. A prince of symmetries, the mirror deliberately inverts the image, exchanging right for left but never top for bottom. Exceptions are the curved mirrors, the miroirs sorcieres.

In the wardrobe, on the contrary, nothing is lost. Container par excellence, it collects and preserves all that a man's life can desire, and secretes the present, the past and perhaps even the future. Heir to the Renaissance studioli, where, instead of the mirror, the image par excellence, painting, or rather the representation of all those stories consecrated to the memory of human history, found its place. But the Armoire is above all Mémoire. The theatre of Memory is not only made up of images, paintings, sculptures, arcane symbols, and mirrors of past events, but also of drawers, shelves, and compartments, concealed and hidden from the sight of most, where writings, documents, iconic cryptographies for the knowledge of past worlds, useful for the present and structuring the future, are kept.
 This is what Renaissance studioli were like, hidden places where the most precious things were kept, the most cherished memories, books worthy of being read by torchlight and candlelight, embellished with magnificent paintings, inlaid by skilled craftsmen and talented sculptors.

So were those of Federigo da Montefeltro, Isabella d'este, Cosimo de Medici and many others. On the walls, lives of illustrious men, episodes from the Bible, myths and legends of ancient Greece, illustrated by Botticelli, Francesco di Giorgio Martini or Perugino, to represent the Platonic summa of the Harmony Mundi that brought the arts to a single state and morality and beauty to a single hiatus. Hidden places, seldom opened but only to the intimates of the master of the house, a veritable setting for the soul of the noble humanist. A testing ground for the ebonistic virtuosity of generations of artists, sculptors and craftsmen, it has known a definitive oblivion in the contemporary world, where the memory of the past and the possible events of an improbable future are given to very different containers. Curiously, the mirror resists, bent from domestic use to normal daily needs, inside those same containers which, having lost the arcane charm of yesteryear, only preserve its functional structure. Through an inversion of form and, of course, of meaning, the mirror is placed inside, no longer an uncomfortable witness to our weaknesses, to the rather anonymous, albeit technically perfect, forms of the domestic armoire, called into use solely for strictly functional needs.

Strange fate, this of the mirror. A very contradictory object, albeit full of mysterious fascination, like the Speculum Majus, an infinite encyclopaedia, perhaps the first in history, composed in three million words by Vincent de Beauvais in the 13th century, with the ambitious aim of reflecting, speculum, all human knowledge in a single glance. A kind of catoptric theatre, reminiscent of that Julius Camillus Delminio who attempted a similar feat three centuries later. The mirror and memory thus seem linked to a strange common destiny.
 A symbolic form, the mirror reflecting a concrete necessity of the spirit. An (incomprehensible) symbol of the virtues of Wisdom and Prudence, we find it juxtaposed to the depiction of these qualities in the tombs of the greats of the past, from Louis XII to Sixtus V and Innocent VIII, to François II and Marguerite de Foix.

To know oneself. The mirror reflects and thus sends back to us our own image, and not only the mundane one, so that we can make it the object of sublime reflection. In the mirror phase Lacan identifies a fundamental moment in the individual's identity growth. In early infancy, before the end of eighteen months of life, the child looks at itself in the mirror and through this builds the unity of the self, necessary for proper growth. Like mother's milk. The mirror, its reflective power, contributes to the construction of the ego but also to its destruction, often juxtaposed with the image of old age and death. Tempus fugit. This perhaps explains the reflection of the reflection, the mirror that from apparent becomes hidden in today's armoire, configuring the removal of old age and death that acts in the contemporary world. Seneca had already admonished the use of the mirror "...If he is young, the blossoming of age will warn him that the time has come to conceive valiant actions; if he is old, he will renounce what dishonours his white hair and will sometimes turn his thoughts to death...". The man of today, devoted to carpe diem, terrified by the image of an end that precludes any hope of future life, flees the reflection of his image, heralding the imminent end. Lacan reiterates and duplicates. The mirror image evokes a double that refers to mysterious worlds that the imagination multiplies in a refraction that goes towards infinity.

Legends and superstitions recommend caution in the use of this domestic but undomesticated tool. These include the prohibition of looking in the mirror at night for fear of getting lost, the custom of veiling mirrors in the homes of the dead, and finally, the most common of all, the fear of breaking the mirror that reflects the terror of finding a similar end. Power of the Reflected Image, I am that. But the Armoire à Glacé are above all linked to bedrooms, to the diurnal mirroring of one's own possibilities, to the sunlight that protects the consciousness from strange physiognomies that bounce from the bed and float in the room like nocturnal ghosts, images of sleep that the other side of the mirror, the one hidden from the human gaze, appropriates.
 Never look in the mirror at night. One might see things from the other world.

In the short film 'le Sang d'un poète', Jean Cocteau tells us about crossing the mirror. The poet, prompted by a statue in the room, crosses the mirror and finds himself in another world, in the Hotel des Folies Dramatiques, where he witnesses a shooting and the rendezvous of Hermaphrodite and finally, finding a gun, shoots himself and, after other arcane adventures, crosses the mirror again and kills the statue.

To be is to be perceived: from this assumption by Berkley, Samuel Becket constructs a bizarre story, a film where Buster Keaton is killed by his own image reflected in the mirror.