Metamorphosis of Narcissus

On the left a kneeling figure - Narcissus - bends over a still pool, gazing at his reflection; on the right an identical stone hand holds an egg from which a narcissus flower sprouts, the two forms mirroring each other in Dali's famous double-image technique. He devised this 'paranoiac-critical' method to make one shape read as two at once. Now in the Tate, the Metamorphosis of Narcissus turns Ovid's myth of self-love and transformation into a hallucinatory visual pun - the body becoming stone, becoming flower - a hypnotic meditation on change, vanity, and the slippery nature of seeing.