ABSTRACT
When Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses he explored in nearly every way possible the potential for the temporal written word to portray transformation or the passage of time. His text recounted dozens of narratives, each bringing to life the physical and spiritual metamorphoses of mythological personas and creatures. In the context of the paragone, Ovid’s stories of transformation were the consummate declaration of the poet’s power over the temporal in art. The story of Narcissus was a vehicle for demonstration of artistic virtue. To depict Narcissus in the non-temporal art of painting or sculpture, one must show the most emblematic moment of the myth — the one that manifests the image’s iconic power, such that it can bring about both a torturous love of the thing represented and death. Irrespective of the technical skill required to master the reflection in a two-dimensional medium, the reflection itself was the first celebrated image in history.
