Saints Michael and Francis

(Detail)

Juan de Flandres

c. 1500-20

Tempera and oil on panel

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Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Complete painting

[Plate 81, Replete with Meaning]

Closely related to Northern Renaissance compositonal schemes in which the wall behind the figures is pierced by a window, is the use of a mirror to open and expand the interior space. This device derives directly from the Arnolfini Portrait and appears in Hunt's The Awakening Conscience , Fanny Holman Hunt (1869), Il Dolce Far Niente , and the various versions of The Lady of Shalott he created between 1856 and 1896. Augustus Egg used it in the first panel of Past and Present and Rossetti in Lady Lilith . . . .