Narcissus is the Greek myth of a beautiful young man who sees his own face in a pool, falls in love with it, cannot leave the water's edge and dies there, leaving a flower in his place. Painters have used it for vanity and for love that goes unanswered, and the picture most often cited is Caravaggio's Narcissus in Rome, painted around 1597 to 1599.
The story reaches painters through Ovid. The seer Tiresias says the boy will live long if he fails to recognize himself. The nymph Echo, whom Juno has condemned to repeat only what others say, loves him and is turned away. One of the many young men he has scorned prays that Narcissus may love in his turn and not have what he loves. Nemesis hears the prayer, and the boy lies down at a spring in the heat of noon.
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The pool was not always a warning about vanity. In his treatise On Painting, written in 1435, Leon Battista Alberti claimed that the inventor of painting, according to the poets, was Narcissus, the boy who was turned into a flower.
Ovid, the poet whom later painters read, never makes the boy a painter. His Narcissus makes nothing. He takes the face in the water for someone else, and once he understands that it is his own, he stays at the spring until he dies.
That makes the pool a strange place to start a painter's story, and it leaves a question that the pictures below answer one by one. Is Narcissus a warning about vanity, or a portrait of the painter at work? The answers run from a dark canvas in Rome whose painter is still disputed to Dalí's Narcissus in London.
What You'll Discover
Why a Renaissance writer made him a painter.
Who else may have painted the pool.
What Cupid is doing beside the sleeper.
Who Waterhouse seated on the boulder.
What the hand beside him holds.