Reflected immersion

So what about reflective objects? If you take a look at them, they are able to translate their shape to a particular image generated from a single perspective. I started to reflect on this a few weeks back, trying to understand what it is that attracts my attention to it.

After doing some experiments, I ended up creating a 3D “Baconian” environment with a reflective object at the centre. In this video, I only used a simple cube just to observe the possible relations between the two objects and the environment.

Five days later (Today), I was wandering inside the National Gallery and I saw a really interesting piece from 1468 by artist Bartolomé Bermejo: Saint Michael Triumphs over the Devil.

When you take a closer look, you can see the reflection of a city.

I was curious about this and I wanted to know thy the artist painted this city in the reflection on St Michel’s breastplate, I wanted to understand the function of this reflection.

At the moment, it is clear to me that both pieces (video and painting) share the same idea of immersion of the viewer by showing something that might be behind the spectator, however, I think that there is much more to it, and I plan to do more research on this matter.

References:

National Gallery website: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/