The First Selfie from Ancient Rome

Check out this early selfie: it’s a first-century CE Ancient Roman fresco showing a woman looking at herself in a mirror. The image is a rare subject in early art, largely attributable to the fact that mirrors were extremely expensive throughout most of human history. Often, they were made of polished stone, like obsidian, or smooth metals, like steel: glass mirrors backed with thin coats of metal gave the best image, but were exceedingly difficult to create: the glass had to be free of distorting metals, it needed to be relatively flat, and it couldn’t shatter when layered with the hot molten metal that allowed for its reflective properties to exist. In fact, not until the 15th century did the capabilities and cost to make silver-backed mirrors become widely available, and even then, only for the wealthiest of merchants and royalty. What sort of outlook would cultures who couldn’t regularly see themselves develop? How would the interior thoughts of mirror-less people differ from our own? Historian Ian Mortimer argues that the 15th-century “modern” mirror profoundly changed people. From his perspective, the mirror caused people to identify themselves more as individuals rather than as members of a community. He brings up the corresponding rise of individual portraiture, the attention ordinary folks started giving to their own birthdays (for astrological predictions), and even the rise in bedrooms as private sleeping spaces as evidence for this. We cannot go back in time to corroborate Ian Mortimer’s hypotheses, but we can ask ourselves what it means for us personally to be living in a culture that encourages us to constantly gaze at our reflections.