Caravaggio
Conveying an air of brooding melancholy, the figure of Narcissus, surrounded by darkness, is locked within a circle with his own reflection, to the point that his only reality lies within that loop created by his own vanity. It is in Metamorphoses, that the poet Ovid recounts the story of Narcissus, a handsome youth who eventually dies after falling in love with his own reflection.
The Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti equated the story of Narcissus with artists: "the inventor of painting ... was Narcissus ... What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?" Is it coincidence, that this is one of only two known Caravaggios depicting a scene from Classical mythology?