In this session we will have a look at two artworks with the same title: "Self portrait in a convex mirror". The first one is a small, mannerist painting by Francesco Parmegianino painted on a convex piece of poplar wood, probably in 1523/24. The second one is a famous postmodern poem by John Ashbery, written in 1973/74. "The Francesco
Parmigianino's celebrated anamorphic self-portrait becomes, as the object of elaborately digressive meditation, a skewed representation of a skewed representation. This itself comprises, in its intense mimetic function, another sort of figurative mirror in which the self-portrait of the artist generates an image of the poet at work, and thereby of anyone at the rest of life." (John Hollander: The Gazer's Spirit).