My favorite object d’art is a small mirror in a corner of my living room. It sits above my husband’s triangular desk on which he has placed his favorite object d’art, a wooden Maltese Falcon.
My mirror has the shape of a Greek lyre. Its frame is back-to-back swan-like inverted S’s of painted black wood. Bas-reliefs of golden laurel leaves rest mid-frame on both sides. Gold also outlines its slender neck and reed-like strings rising from the small bridge across the top. Apollo himself, God of the Lyre, looks out from the broader bottom, in golden bas-relief. Looking into the mirror, I see my face reflected at the center, just above Apollo’s.
You know I have a passion for everything Greek. Even my young granddaughter noticed. At age six she asked why we had so many Dionysuses in my house”? And we do. A colorful ceramic mask and a small statue of a satyr peeing, both from Florence, a Caravaggio print of the wine God drunk and decadent amongst rotting fruit, and a Lalique candle holder in which his wreathed face gleams when lit. My sister-in-law chose that one for my birthday years ago.
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And not only Dionysus. In our bedroom, there is a small reproduction of the sculpture of The Three Graces, a huge copy of Matisse’s Icarus Falling, a little copy of Dante Gabrielle Rosetti’s painting of Proserpine eating that fateful pomegranate. In one of our many moves, we lost a replica of Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Woman, but a piece of the Metropolitan Museum’s Roman Wall Painting sits above our dining room table. It is the depiction of the stage set of a Greek theater, of course.
But that mirror remains a favorite. It is not a reproduction of an artwork I can find on Google. The piece was carefully chosen by my mother, Esther, to sit atop a delicate Chinese black lacquer table in her living room, which she decorated in what I used to call ‘Asian-Jewish Renaissance.’ I have no idea where she found the mirror. When my mother showed it to me, she said, “I hope you like this. I bought it with you in mind, and want it to be yours when I die.” I never thought she appreciated that part of me that was a classics professor. Nor did I acknowledge how much of me she understood. Now when I stand before the mirror, I see us both, mother and daughter, looking very much alike and loving each other from afar.
Images are from the author’s personal collection.
