Caravaggio's Narcissus shows a young man in a brocade doublet leaning over a dark pool, so absorbed in his own reflection that nothing else exists. The story comes from Ovid, and the painting is dated to about 1597 to 1599. It hangs in Rome, in the Palazzo Barberini.
In Ovid's version, a beautiful boy rejects every admirer, bends to drink from a spring, falls in love with the face looking back at him and wastes away beside it. Caravaggio painted no nymph Echo and no forest. He left the boy and his double, closed into one circle against the dark.
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The attribution has never been settled. No document names the person who ordered the canvas or the first person who owned it.
The doubt did not come only from outsiders. Mina Gregori, one of the best-known Caravaggio scholars, defended the attribution until 1989. Then she edited the catalog of an exhibition held in 1991 and 1992, where this same Narcissus was shown as the work of Spadarino, a Roman follower of Caravaggio.
A national museum hangs the canvas under Caravaggio's name, and the scholar who once defended it edited a catalog that gave it to someone else.
Who first called it a Caravaggio?
The critic Roberto Longhi did, in 1913. He came across the canvas in Milan, in the collection of Paolo D'Ancona, with no famous name attached to it.
In 1916, in a study of Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia, he published it as the work of Caravaggio himself and called it one of the painter's "most personal inventions."
Longhi believed it was painted between 1597 and 1599, while Caravaggio lived in the household of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. The canvas soon passed to a collector who eventually gave it to the Roman gallery where it hangs.
Longhi's name stayed on the label for decades. Then other scholars began proposing other hands.
What You'll Discover
Who else might have painted it.
What a 1645 export permit says.
What the X-rays found under the paint.
Why painters made Narcissus their patron.