Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Narcissus.
The gallery
Narcissus
Caravaggio, c. 1597–1599
Caravaggio isolates Ovid's hunter at the pool: a single figure bent over his own reflection, knee and sleeve catching the only light in an otherwise black void. Desire and doom collapse into one circular composition — the youth already trapped by the image that will waste him into a flower. Oil on canvas, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica (Palazzo Barberini), Rome.
Echo and Narcissus
John William Waterhouse, 1903
Waterhouse stages the double tragedy of Metamorphoses Book III: Narcissus stretched beside a forest pool, lost in his reflection, while the nymph Echo watches helplessly from the rocks. The Pre-Raphaelite landscape makes the Thespian spring both beautiful and fatal. Oil on canvas, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
Echo and Narcissus
Nicolas Poussin, c. 1629
Poussin's classical pastoral shows Narcissus already fading by the water while Echo collapses in grief and a putto mourns nearby — Ovid's metamorphosis rendered as ordered landscape tragedy. The youth who loved only himself becomes part of the still pool that destroyed him. Oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Narcissus
Follower of Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, c. 1500
This Milanese Renaissance panel presents Narcissus as a half-length youth leaning over a stone basin, his face mirrored in the water — the myth reduced to its essential trap of sight and self. Long associated with Leonardo's circle through Boltraffio, the painting holds the National Gallery, London.
On screen
In play
Narcissism
Psychology took the hunter's name for self-absorption — from clinical narcissistic personality to everyday 'narcissist' — so the pool at Thespiae still names a modern diagnosis.
Narcissus (plant)
The daffodil genus keeps the myth in every spring garden: Ovid's youth who wasted into a flower still blooms as narcissus along roadsides and in florist shops.
Hades II
Supergiant Games
Supergiant's sequel brings Narcissus back as a vain, pool-bound shade — the hunter still admiring himself while the underworld war rages past.