Narcissus

A young man kneels at the edge of a dark pool, transfixed by his own reflection, his bent body and its mirror image closing into an almost perfect circle around a band of black water. Caravaggio reduces Ovid's tale of Narcissus to this single, hypnotic loop of self-regard, the boy and his double the only things in the night. The knee, thrust forward and brightly lit, anchors the composition. Spare and strange among his crowded religious dramas, it is a haunting emblem of vanity and the trap of self-love.