Narciso

This comes from Caravaggio's Rome in the late 1590s, when he was a young painter making his name under the protection of a cardinal. Mythology was rare for him. He mostly painted saints and street people, but here he takes the old story of Narcissus, the youth who fell in love with his own reflection and could not look away. Caravaggio strips everything out. No forest, no flowers, no nymph. Just a boy leaning over dark water, and his double hanging upside down beneath him, the two figures meeting at the knee to make a closed loop with nothing outside it. It is worth knowing that the attribution has been argued over for a long time. Some scholars have given it to other painters of his circle, and a restoration in 1995 is what pushed opinion back toward Caravaggio.