Caravaggio, Alberti, and Narcissan Disegno

Abstract

IN HIS REVOLUTIONARY TREATISE ON PAINTING , Alberti called upon painters not merely to pursue a generic ideal of naturalism—one already conventional by the time he wrote—but to ground their techniques of image making more rigorously in the optics of visual perception. The novelty of this aim surely accounts for the novelty of Alberti’s installation of the ambivalent figure of Narcissus as the inventor of painting, for which no precedent has been found in ancient or medieval sources. In the opening pages of the second book of the treatise, Alberti wrote, “I used to say among my friends that the inventor of painting was Narcissus, who according to the opinion of poets was turned into a flower. Because painting is the flower of all the arts, all of the tale of Narcissus is relevant to this subject. What else would you call the act of painting but a similar embracing of the surface of the pool by the means of art?” Much has been written about this slippery passage. In Ovid’s telling, the beautiful youth Narcissus rejected relations with admirers of both sexes; in the retribution enacted by the goddess Nemesis, when Narcissus sought isolation and rest in a cool grove, he became inflamed with love for his own reflection, which he saw for the first time in an