Who’s That Arsehole in the Mirror?

You know how it’s the Middle Ages and you’re combing your hair and thinking you look pretty fine, and then you look in the mirror and you see the arse of the Devil? This guy has somehow got it backwards. Or sideways. I’m not quite sure.

The brooch is very interesting though, iconographically. The man is shown in an attitude associated in contemporary illustrations with defecation. But the comb and mirror suggest the toilette, rather than the toilet. The comb and mirror are usually seen in late medieval imagery in the hands of women, and these implements are markers of vanity and excessive attention to worldly and fleeting concerns. In Dance of Death imagery, Death appears in the mirror of a woman he has come to take away. And there is a famous image from a late 15th-century print edition of the Book of the Knight of the Tower where a woman primping before a mirror sees, rather than her own face, the reflection of the Devil’s behind.

The original of this remarkable brooch was found in the Netherlands and is dated 1350-1400. It has the remains of the little tabs that will have held a minuscule mirror in the pewter frame, and we have supplied these with tiny mirrors as well.