self portraiture
It is inarguably true that there is nothing intellectually or artistically inferior about exploring the body and the self (and truer still that men write about their bodies and themselves all the time, but they often get to pretend they’re writing about something else when they do and are generally taken at their word — whereas a woman could
... See moreYou painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.
The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.