1598, Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) (?), Narcissus -- Palazzo Barberini (Rome)
From the museum label: This is a highly debated painting in the traditional corpus of Caravaggio's works and has divided scholars into those who defend Merisi as its author and others who put forward other attributions, the most reliable one being Giovanni Antonio Galli, also known as Spadarino (1585-1652).
Then, just to complicate things even further, there is the problem of the extraordinarily original rendition of the subject, based on Ovid's Metamorphoses but painted in a mysterious, concentrated nocturnal setting that plays subtly on the themes of identity and the double, of recognition and illusion. These are common motifs affecting the status of self-representation, of the individual and of painting, torn between the attempt to faithfully reproduce reality and the risk of pretense and deception, which were to be the epistemological obsessions of the 17th century.
1598, Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) (?), Narcissus -- Palazzo Barberini (Rome)
From the museum label: This is a highly debated painting in the traditional corpus of Caravaggio's works and has divided scholars into those who defend Merisi as its author and others who put forward other attributions, the most reliable one being Giovanni Antonio Galli, also known as Spadarino (1585-1652).
Then, just to complicate things even further, there is the problem of the extraordinarily original rendition of the subject, based on Ovid's Metamorphoses but painted in a mysterious, concentrated nocturnal setting that plays subtly on the themes of identity and the double, of recognition and illusion. These are common motifs affecting the status of self-representation, of the individual and of painting, torn between the attempt to faithfully reproduce reality and the risk of pretense and deception, which were to be the epistemological obsessions of the 17th century.