WIKIPEDIA; M.C. ESCHER, "MAGIC MIRROR"Eric Altschuler has been staring at mirrors. Specifically, those of van Eyck, Caravaggio, Parmigianino, Escher, and other painters. The Temple University professor and his colleague V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego, are on the hunt for novel ways that artists have presented reflections, as a means of seeking out potentially new modes of therapy.
Ramachandran and Altschuler have pioneered methods of using a mirror to alleviate phantom limb pain and other conditions. A patient sits at the side of the mirror with, say, his right arm reflected in front of the glass. The patient peeks around the corner to view the reflection as if he were looking at his left arm—a setup Ramachandran and Altschuler call the parasagittal reflection.
In their cataloging of mirrors in art, presented as a poster at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting held in Chicago this week, Altschuler and Ramachandran found that for 500 or more years, painters presented frontal plane reflections (a straight-on view in the mirror). It wasn’t until 1946 that something different—the parasagittal view, in particular—appeared in fine art: in M.C. ...
