Pyeongye
A goldsmith in a red robe holds up a set of scales. Beside him stand a woman in a gold brocade gown and a man in a tall black hat. His hand rests on her shoulder. She reaches toward the counter. They have come to buy something.
But there are two more people in this picture. They are not inside the shop, and they are not at the counter. Where are they?
Look at the lower right, at the round mirror propped at the end of the counter.
It is a convex mirror, bulging outward. Inside it is the street outside the shop. A row of houses with pink walls and pointed gables. An arched doorway, small windows, a wide gray square in front. Because the glass curves, the houses bend around its edge.
Think about which way that mirror faces. It looks out of the shop, toward the street, toward the spot where you are standing as you look at the painting. The shop is open to the street, and we are passersby peering in over the counter.
So the mirror ought to show us. Let's look closer at its lower half.
Instead it shows two men. The one on the left wears a bright red jacket and a big black hat. The one on the right has a green cloth wrapped around his head and a dark coat, and a falcon perches on his hand. Both seem to be looking into the shop.
The painting does not tell us who they are. Customers waiting their turn? Idle onlookers? We cannot say. What we can say is that the painter fit faces, folds of cloth, and the feathers of a bird into a mirror about the size of a hand.
The painter was Petrus Christus, who worked in Bruges, a trading city in Flanders, in what is now Belgium. He became a citizen of Bruges in 1444.
Bruges had already been home to Jan van Eyck. In The Arnolfini Portrait of 1434, van Eyck hung a convex mirror on the back wall of a room and showed the whole room in it, along with figures in the doorway. Christus's mirror holds the street outside the shop.
Now drop down to the front edge of the counter.
One pan of the scales holds a tiny golden object. Weights and little scraps of metal lie scattered on the wood. Below them, along the front of the counter, runs a line of white lettering in Latin. It says that Master Petrus Christus made me in 1449. The painting announces its own maker and its own year. At the end of the line is a small mark shaped a little like a heart.
The panel now hangs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In a shop full of jewels and vessels, one hand-sized round of glass holds an entire street.
