Narcissus (Caravaggio)

Narcissus is an oil on canvas painting attributed to Caravaggio and dated to around 1597 to 1599, held in the Galleria Nazionale d Arte Antica in Rome. It shows the mythological youth Narcissus, drawn from Ovid Metamorphoses, leaning over water to gaze at his own reflection while dressed in elegant clothing. Caravaggio encloses the figure and its distorted mirror image in a tight, dark composition that critics have described as brooding and melancholic. The attribution to Caravaggio, now widely accepted, was first proposed by the art historian Roberto Longhi in 1916. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/