Narcissus by Caravaggio

Narcissus by Caravaggio, 1597-1599

Alas, wretched boy; while you hope for comfort from your warm mouth, From that very place you drink in certain death."' About the time when Caravaggio was most closely in contact with Marino, in the years around the Contarelli chapel, he painted one of his most haunting works, the Narcissus, a mythological subject almost alone in Caravaggio's works. In Ovid's Metamorphoses the poet describes how the handsome boy Narcissus, who had spurned the love of his companions, was condemned to fall in love with his own reflection, and to perish from this unrequited love.

Weary from the hunt, Narcissus stooped to drink "at a clear pool, with shining silvery waters, where shepherds had never made their way; no goats that pasture on the Mountains, no cattle had ever come there. Its peace was undisturbed by bird or beast or falling branches ... encircling woods sheltered the spot from the fierce sun, and made it always cool." Here Narcissus, as he drank, "was enchanted by the beautiful reflection that he saw. He fell in love with an insubstantial hope, mistaking a mere shadow for a real body. Spellbound by his own self, he remained there motionless, with fixed gaze, like a statue carved from Parian marble."

In Caravaggio's painting there is no reference to the ancient world; Narcissus is a young Roman boy, in a sleeveless damask doublet, looking into a pool; Caravaggio has pared down Ovid's narrative, rendering its stark essence. The composition is based on a circle, and within it, circle within a circle, is Narcissus' knee, startlingly foreshortened! The drawing is distorted, with the curve of the back unnaturally long, as though the whole figure has been pulled out sideways, and thus locked into the demands of this circular composition. It creates a sense of intense concentration, and the picture's meaning lies in this circle of self- love.

Yet it may also be read as a tribute to the illusionistic power of painting, to the power of the artist to create a duplicate world. Figure and reflection have almost equal weight, and reality and illusion are divided by touches of white water. The play on reality and illusion is given prominence in Philostratus' "Imagines", which contains a long description of a painting of Narcissus. "The pool", writes Philostratus, "paints Narcissus, and the painting represents both the pool and the whole story of Narcissus. A youth just returned from the hunt stands over the pool, drawing from within himself a kind of yearning, and falling in love with his own beauty ... The painting has such regard for realism that it even shows drops of dew dripping from the flowers ... As for you, however, Narcissus, it is no painting that has deceived you, nor are you engrossed in a thing of pigments or wax; but you do not realise that the water represents you exactly as you are when you gaze upon it."

No other painting by Caravaggio is inspired by the Metamorphoses, but he was a common source for Marino, and in the Galeria he devoted a sequence of four poems to paintings of Narcissus. Marino's poems play on the relationship of art to nature, and of reality to illusion. He writes of Narcissus' face, wondering whether canvas or water bestows a more vivid reality; he writes, as Philostratus had written, of layered deceptions, of Narcissus deceived by the fountain, and the spectator by paint and canvas, of an image so real that nature herself, a tiger glimpsing its mirror image, pauses in wonderment. In a sonnet to Bernardo Castello's Narcissus Marino praises the artist's illusionism:

No imitation fountain is this for what is seen in it is real and living; living is the wave and then elaborates the theme in Philostratus, of Narcissus' rapt silence before his reflection: The boy keeps silent, utterly absorbed in fixed contemplation of that face that so delighted him. The virtuoso power of the artist is s a constant theme in Marino, and perhaps both he and Caravaggio knew the puzzling reference in the treatise On Painting, by the Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti, to the myth of Narcissus as symbolising the origins of painting � 'the inventor of painting, according to the poets, was Narcissus ... What is painting but the act of embracing, by means of art, the surface of the pool?'

And in Caravaggio's picture the illusion is heightened by the sense that it is caught and held only for an instant, and that as Narcissus' hand disturbs the surface of the pool, it will vanish. Narcissus' fate was tragic, Marino writes of the "lethal fountain", and Caravaggio conveys a dark melancholy. Narcissus' eyes are deeply shadowed, his full lips voluptuous, and his yearning gaze is fixed on black water. This water was frequently associated by ancient writers with the waters of the Styx, and the narcissus into which the boy was transformed was associated with death, with Demeter and Persephone, with dank pools and funereal flowers.

Here no flowering narcissus blooms by the pool, nor does the nymph Echo, who languished with love for him, accompany the lovely youth; his story is unrelieved by the promise of redemption or metamorphosis. In this association of love with death Caravaggio is again close to Marino, whose lyric verse evokes a dark and fated sensuality. In a series of poems to a young boy, Ligurino, Marino warns of the passing of youth and beauty:

Yet time, O, Ligurino, will at last Shrivel the Graces' garden, making it One horrid desert: and will cast the bloom All angelic beauty to the dust ...

Caravaggio's Narcissus, like his Boy Bitten by a Lizard and his Lute Player, is perhaps also a vanitas, a warning against the darkness and horror that follow the beauties and vain pleasures of love and youth. There is no contemporary reference to Caravaggio's Narcissus and we do not know for whom it was painted, but it seems likely that it may be connected to these Roman literary circles, so dominated by Marino, and was perhaps painted under the encouragement of Marino and the highly refined Vincenzo Giustiniani.

Equally belittled is military glory, defamed and discredited by the useless cuirass and empty pieces of armor. As the final humiliation, the crown and sceptre are almost hidden among the folds of white drapery on the table.