Mirror Mirror on the Wall.

Hamlet and Socrates saw art as a mirror held up to nature. "Socrates saw mirrors as but reflecting what we can already see; so art, insofar as mirror-like, yields idle accurate duplications of the appearances of things, and is of no cognitive benefit whatever," Wartenberg, p207. Hamlet saw mirrors as something that exposes what we could not already see. Art, being mirror-like, reveals us to ourselves. I find this idea rather interesting because it makes me wonder if mirrors are basically revelers of truth and if they hold more truth than reality. Art is just imitation of nature, after all, and if art is a mirror of the world, than that may make art communication of what is true and unseen by the naked eye.

"The dominant aesthetic theory of the early eighteenth century was that man should hold a mirror to nature. Put like that, it seems rather crude and misleading; in fact, a falsehood. To hold up a mirror to nature is merely to copy what is already there. This is not what these theorists meant by this phrase. By nature they meant life, and by life they meant not what one saw, but that towards which they supposed life to strive, certain ideal forms towards which all life was tending... the highest artistic genius consisted in somehow visualizing that inner objective ideal towards which nature and man tended, and somehow embodying this in a noble painting. That is, there is some kind of universal pattern, and this the artist is able to incorporate in images, as a philosopher or the scientist is capable of incorporating it in propositions." Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, p26.

My question to you is: In what ways are mirrors revelers of the truth and is art just a mirror of nature, in your opinion?