Narcissus at the Fountain

Around 1500 in Milan, the young painters who had trained near Leonardo were all working in his shadow, and this small panel shows how hard that shadow was to escape. It gives us a young man in profile, bending toward water, and the story behind him is the old one from Ovid: Narcissus, who leaned over a pool, saw his own reflection, and could not stop looking until he wasted away. What is strange is that the painter shows him in strict profile, so we never see the face in the water that undid him. Behind the figure the rocks and cool light borrow directly from Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks, the kind of landscape his pupils learned to copy. For a long time the picture drifted between names. Its manner is so close to that of two other Leonardo followers, Bernardino Luini and Andrea Solario, that scholars struggled to say whose hand it was before settling on Boltraffio. A near-identical version hangs in the National Gallery in London. Today the panel hangs in the Uffizi's Correggio room.