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Photograph provided by the Soprintendenza di Pompei and reproduced under the authorization of Italy’s Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism—Archaeological Park of Pompeii. Further reproduction or duplication in any medium is prohibited.
Photograph provided by the Soprintendenza di Pompei and reproduced under the authorization of Italy’s Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism—Archaeological Park of Pompeii. Further reproduction or duplication in any medium is prohibited.
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Notes
Thanks are due at the outset to the audience at the Pisa conference where this paper was first presented for many helpful questions and to its hosts and organizers, especially Alison Keith, Laurel Fulkerson, Alessandro Schiesaro, and Gianpiero Rosati. I am also indebted to the editors of this journal for their patience and to my referees for exceptionally helpful responses to an earlier draft. This final version owes as much to the rich suggestions of my ‘credulous’ reader as to the bracing disbelief of the other, although I remain very conscious that it fails to do justice to the former and will not avert the latter. The Keats quotation in my title also appears in Elsner’s description of Narcissus (2000, 90), but I hope its relevance to my argument justifies my use of it.
Konon, BNJ 26 F 1.24. For a full comparison, see Manuwald 1975. Papyrus evidence has revealed another treatment of the myth available to Ovid that likely derives from of Parthenius’ Metamorphoses; see Hutchinson 2006.
Manuwald 1975, 353.
The terms of this distinction come from Zanker 1966. On the structure of the episode, see Vinge 1967, 17: ‘Owing to the recognition, the reflection episode divides up into two parts or stages, and the reflection motif here proves to contain two motifs—the error and the recognition motifs’.
Bömer 1969, 538. Manuwald 1975, 363, recognizes that a ‘knowing’ Narcissus is compatible with the version in Konon.
Ovid’s coalescence of desire with knowledge of the self through the Tiresian premonition is also particularly emphasized in Bartsch 2006 (esp. p. 85).
Gildenhard and Zissos 2000, 134, also note this as an ideal Aristotelian recognition. For a discussion of Aristotle’s influence on Augustan poets’ appropriation of tragedy, see Curley 2013, 52–3. Jolivet 2009 offers a precise and compelling demonstration of the importance of Aristotelian categories in Ovid’s construction of recognition scenes although he does not go so far as to suggest that Aristotle’s influence is meant to be recognized by the reader.
‘Narcissus’ situation now exactly mirrors that of the engaged reader: he knows with his rational mind that the reflection has no reality, but cannot stop himself from continuing to address it if it had’, Hardie 2002, 148.
For a more comprehensive theoretical account of how narratological notions of the representation of time can be applied to Ovidian narrative, see Nikolopoulos 2004, 41–68.
For such irony as a fundamental connection between Ovid’s Narcissus and the tragic Oedipus, see the discussion of Gildenhard and Zissos, 2000, 136–7.
OLD s.v. video § 11. Tempus, it should be noted, rarely appears in this idiom.
Calame 2005, 105–7.
See especially Rosati 1983, 23–42.
Cf. the perceptive comments of Anderson 1997, 374.
See above all Hardie 1988 (=2002, 150–165) and Bartsch 2006, 84–103. The former offers a powerful demonstration of the narrative as a response to a Lucretian epistemology based on sight, which it re-mythologizes by moving to an earlier, mythical context; the latter sees the Lucretian allusions as also implying a rejection of Socratic models of instruction through erotic knowledge, which she anchors in Roman sexual attitudes. Narcissus emerges as a negative example within the Platonic tradition already in late antiquity at Plot. 1.6.8.8, as one who devotes himself to visible, corporeal images as if they were true (further 5.8.2.34); see Hadot 1976. However, following from Hadot’s demonstration (pp. 100–101) that for Plotinus, in contrast to the Gnostics, the fault lies not in the images themselves but in their misinterpretation, my own reading, below in section 4, will stress the availability of Platonic forms within Ovid’s Narcissus narrative alongside their Lucretian debunking.
This would be a contemporary as well as an archaizing interpretation: Wilkins 1917, in the course of a comprehensive discussion of the meaning of the Delphic inscription in antiquity, includes evidence for its use as a memento mori in Hellenistic and later epitaphs and poems (pp. 52–9). Other interpretations that have applied the Delphic intimations of Tiresias’ words to Narcissus’ story include Zanker 1966, 153, for whom reference to the saying points to a transition in the myth by which Narcissus’ misapprehension of his image becomes ‘a sort of transgression’ (as opposed to his offense against Eros). He connects this transgression with the Neo-Platonic use of Narcissus, discussed in the previous note (p. 154). See also Cancik 1967, 45–6, who views Ovid as transforming and deflecting the full import of the phrase as a reminder of mortality: ‘Der Delphische Spruch hat also bei Ovid nicht mehr eine theologische und moralische, sondern vor allem eine psychologische und, wenn man will, existentielle Bedeutung’. Gildenhard and Zissos 2000, 132, note that line 3.348 also virtually translates Tiresias’ later warning to Oedipus’ mother at Soph. OT 1068.
Hardie (2002, 165–72). The phrase of course alludes to Segal 1997; see especially pp. 215–71, on the theatrical illusion as a manifestation of Dionysus. Ovid’s profound engagement with tragedy throughout the Metamorphoses has been comprehensively demonstrated by Curley 2013.
Gildenhard and Zissos 2000, 144, who in turn refer to an earlier formulation of Hardie (1989, 4) based solely on Lucretian echoes.
The connection had earlier been observed and discussed by Loewenstein 1984, 41–5.
Zinn 2019, 135.
Ibid., 134. On time perception in Lucretius generally, see Zinn 2016.
Note Hardie 2002, 161: ‘Narcissus eventually wakes up from his delusion, at the point when he realizes that his reflection is soundless’.
Hardie 2002, 170. Note also the ‘Dionysiac’ effect of the uncertain focalization in this description that allows this likeness to be recognized at once by the reader and the internal viewer. This could be a comment the narrator adds to facilitate our ability to see Narcissus or it could describe the language he might use of his beloved.
Gildenhard and Zissos 2000, 142–4.
To be clear, the progression from sound to sight does feature in Hardie’s description of a hierarchization of mirrors over echoes as marks of presence in pastoral (2002, 164).
This phenomenological point is meant as a complement to Hardie’s account of the tension between mythical and Lucretian perspectives that results from making Echo the aition for the generation of sonic images. Again, note that this involves making a distinction in times. ‘The nymph Echo belongs to a time before the truths of the Epicurean world are established’ (1988, 77=2002, 154). Thus where Pausanias (9.31.7, see below n. 56) will doubt the Narcissus myth on the grounds that someone old enough to fall in love with his image could not be ignorant of how mirrors work, Narcissus’ failure to consider the possibility that the words he hears repeated to him might simply be an echo, so obvious in hindsight, is exempted from such skepticism when we take it as a reminder that echoes did not yet exist in his world.
On Narcissus in the ekphrastic tradition, see above all Elsner 1996 (=2007, 132–76) and Bann 1989, esp. 105–26.
On the ‘pictorialism’ of Ovid’s narrative, see esp. Vinge 1967, 13–14.
Plin. HN 35.65; cf. also Sen. Controv. 10.5.27 for a variant version. The connection between Zeuxis’ deceptive grapes and the simile at 3.484 is suggested by Hardie 2002, 176, via the description of Liber’s deception of Erigone as ‘a false grape’ on Arachne’s tapestry (6.125). On evocations of this paradigmatic anecdote of visual realism in later ekphrases of Narcissus, see Elsner 2007, 144 (discussing Philost. Imag. 1.23.2), and on the anecdote itself Bann 1989, esp. 32–40.
Butler 2011, 77 uses the designation of the reflected objects as signa (‘statue’, 3.419; ‘meaningful gesture’, 3.360) to link them to the signs present to Ovid’s readers on the page (discussed below, n. 98). Rosati 1983, 36–8, also offers an important discussion of how Ovid’s echoing patterns within the text convert his work into a mimesis of the experiences described. See also von Glinski 2012, 118, on the effect of this verbal figuration within a simile that compares Narcissus himself to a statue. For Narcissus as the prompt for competition between verbal and visual representation in later Greek ekphrastic writing, see Elsner 2007, 140–3.
See esp. the discussion of von Glinski 2012, 120–2.
As Rosati 1983, 42–4, demonstrates, even that apostrophe which can, on the one hand, seem to distance Narcissus from both the audience and the author, by the nature of the gesture itself, also puts the audience in the place of Narcissus. And, indeed, in imagining that there is a ‘credulous’ subject there to be corrected, the audience themselves have fallen for an illusion and so become Narcissuses. See also Hardie 2002, 147.
Valladares 2012, 391.
If Ovid does evoke the foundational story of realistic painting in comparing, via simile, Narcissus’ appearance/reflection to a bunch of grapes, it is perhaps notable that he introduces the notion of temporal change. Both the grapes and the apples that accompany them in the simile are presented at a moment of transition to maturity that makes them even closer images of Narcissus (ut variis solet uva racemis/ducere purpureum nondum matura colorem, 3.484–5).
I am not of course claiming that static images cannot represent narratives. Indeed, one of my referees observes some of the technical devices Roman painters used to overcome this challenge, such as the representation of successive scenes within the same spatial continuum, as in the painting of Dirce in the House of Polybius (Croisille 2005, 181). My point is that the challenge the medium presents to depicting the temporal unfolding of events stands out by contrast to verbal narrative. So, conversely, the challenge that verbal narratives face in conveying visual images stands out by the comparison to painting and sculpture.
So Zanker’s 1966 treatment of Narcissus iconography also divides representations of Narcissus before the moment of self-recognition from those that show its result. The latter are indicated by the motif of Narcissus baring his own body to better enjoy the sight of his reflection. Strikingly, therefore, in these images the moment of recognition has none of the pathos of the Ovidian ‘anagnorisis’ either for the figure or the viewer, both of whom are allowed more fully to enjoy the erotic potential of the image.
Of course, viewers may bring their knowledge of the entire story to the image and even prize representations that seem to have this narrative dimension. Cf. the comment of Callistratus (Descr. 5.1) that ‘the image represents together with Narcissus also his fortune (tuchê)’, (Elsner 2007, 139) and Philostratus’ enigmatic claim that ‘the spring paints Narcissus, and the painting paints the spring and the whole of Narcissus’ (toû Narkissou panta, 1.23.1).
As Elsner 2007, 147, notes in the context of a different argument, a turning point of the myth is precisely the stilling of the previously mobile hunter Narcissus when he catches sight of his reflection. Ovid’s narrative however mutes this effect since, as though it were indeed one of the rhetorical ekphrases Elsner describes, he focuses not on the chase but on the remarkably still grove itself. When Narcissus enters the picture, so to speak, he is already tired (3.413).
See the persuasive suggestion of Vinge 1967, 12 that Latin’s use of the same word, imago, for echoes and reflections facilitates the pairing. Hardie 1988, 74 (=2002, 152) adds a new element by suggesting how this combination of the visual and the verbal sharpens the evocation of Lucretius.
Metamorphosis too is at once Ovid’s subject and a figure for his medium, which, as the poem’s first sentence shows, both changes its signification as it is unpacked in time and in doing so changes words back and forth into bodies (in nova fert…corpora, 1.1–2).
Frontisi-Ducroux 2003, 91–2 and Barchiesi 2020, 19–20.
See also Manuwald 1975, 368–9, on Ovid’s omission of Narcissus’ metamorphosis, which he accounts for as incompatible with Ovid’s description of his death.
The contrast between the permanent and the ephemeral has been celebrated as a central theme of Ovid’s work in the 2019 collection by Casanova-Robin and Sauron, although the analyses included there center on its political significance.
This echo returns at the moment of anagnorisis itself, when it leads Narcissus to make a new prayer for a lover (votum in amante novum, 3.468).
Rosati 1983, 30.
Gildenhard and Zissos 2000, 140–1.
Gildenhard and Zissos, 2000, 136.
Gildenhard and Zissos 2000, 135, quote the lines as the point where ‘the chorus articulates the paradoxical disaster of Oedipus’ life through poignant polyptotic wordplay’.
So also Elsner 2007, 148, whose emphasis, however, is on the relationship between ambiguous sexual roles and ambiguous visual roles, not on temporality per se. Narcissus’ confusing sexual identity as at once desirer and desired also plays an important part in Bartsch’s analysis (2006, 84–103) in relation to both Ovid’s double portrayal of vision as an active and passive process and the larger Roman rejection of the erotic model of education so important to Platonism.
Both Konon and Pausanias refer only to male lovers. As a referee well observes, ‘this issue of priority of male/female lovers does not arise in the Catullan model (62.39 ff.), where it is a flower that is the object of (only figuratively erotic) desire’.
Elsner 2007, 147, relates the impossibility of Narcissus’ desiring an image of himself to the erotic transgressions involved, citing Dover 1978, 16, on the incomprehensibility of lovers of the same age desiring one another.
The hysteron proteron effect of the narrative by which representation seems to come before reality is also the theme of Hamilton 2009, who uses a quite different set of arguments. See too Berger and Gabara 1996.
On umbra as a connection between the image and the shadows of the dead, see Vinge 1967, 12–13. For a fuller account of the underworld aspects of the pool where Narcissus sees his image, and its broader engagement with a Lucretian elision between images of the beloved and images of the dead, see Hardie 2002, 156–8, with further bibliography.
See Hardie’s discussion (2002, 154–5) of the mythical Echo as an ‘aition’ for the Lucretian phenomenon, also p. 160.
See Zeitlin 1996, 231: ‘Hippolytos had refused to cross the boundary between child and adult, thereby transgressing the line of temporality that divides human and divine’. In Konon’s version of the story, Narcissus’ rejection of all lovers is explicitly connected to his being a despiser of the god Eros. Manuwald 1975, 357–8, suggests that Ovid downplays this theme, but both the alternative version of the story and the larger mythic pattern make it readily available. For the comparison of Narcissus to Hippolytus, see, e.g. Hadot 1976, 108; Rudd 1986, 45; Elsner 2007, 153, and on the theme of failed transition to adolescence more broadly, Barchiesi and Rosati 2007, 182–3.
On the evidence for Euripides’ Chrysippus, see, conveniently, Collard and Cropp 2008, 459–63.
For the Dionysiac significance of this moment, as an antiphrastic indicator of the god’s ability to make his victim’s see double, see Hardie 2002, 170. The interpretation that follows owes a great deal to the suggestions of an anonymous referee.
The impossible running together of two different stages of life also features in the story’s reception history. Pausanias rejects the whole idea of Narcissus’ falling in love with his reflection on the grounds that, ‘it is utter stupidity to imagine that a man old enough to fall in love was incapable of distinguishing a man from a man’s reflection’ (Paus. 9.31.7, trans. W. H. S. Jones; emphasis mine). Again, there is an Oedipal connection: the mythical king who was so adept at recognizing that the old man and the infant are one, cannot conceive of his own identity with his earlier self until the climax of the drama. So Pausanias refuses to see as Narcissus because he cannot reconcile precisely the coexistence of child and lover that Ovid’s narrative accentuates.
Indeed, as Barchiesi and Rosati 2007, 179, point out, Narcissus is the first human (male) lover in the poem. On the phenomenon of the ‘future reflexive’ allusion, see Barchiesi 1993.
Trans. Zeitlin, p. 142. On the programmatic impact of this description for Pausanias’ text, see Platt 2011, 218–24 (esp. p. 222); see also her account of the images within the reflection, a Hellenistic group sculpted by Damophon in the 180’s BCE (pp. 124–34).
Platt 2011, 222, alludes to Narcissus in the discussion of this mirror, but only as an example of the deceptiveness of reflection.
Hadot 1976, 97, discusses another mystical mirror as a parallel for Narcissus’ deceptive vision, the mirror which, in Orphic myth, Hera gives the infant Dionysus to distract him and so prepare for his murder by the Titans (Apollod. Bibl. 1.9.19).
There is also a significant Lucretian parallel for such use of a mirror to reveal mortality. At DRN 3.972–5, Lucretius invites his addressee to ‘look back’ at the time before his birth. That period, like death itself ‘nil ad nos’, is described as a mirror nature holds up to show what our experience will be of the time after our death. This too would be a mirror in which the viewer’s reflection would not appear.
So later ‘Acoetes’ first perception of his comrades’ metamorphosis results from one’s darkening (3.671).
Frontisi-Ducroux and Vernant, 1997, 214–15.
Compare von Glinski’s observation (2012, 126–8) of the effect of the transition between images that suggest a material presence within the image (apples and grapes, 3.483–4, which themselves seem ambiguously to describe what Ovid’s audience sees and what the internal spectator sees) and those that describe the actual fading of Narcissus as seen by the narrator (wax and dew, 3.487–90). Since the latter do not describe so much what Narcissus’ looks like as what he was, they remain fixed in the audience’s more ‘real’ perception of the youth himself. She also notes (p. 128) that ‘matutinae is the first temporal marker since the beginning of the story’ (3.413).
Narcissus’ own recognition at 3.463 also involves a recognition of narrative. The present tenses used before describe a perpetual reciprocity: I do something ; you do something. The perfect sensi recasts the present as separated from the past through a decisive action. He can tell his story now.
Cf. Alberti’s famous description of Narcissus as the inventor of painting, (Pict. 2.7), discussed by Bann 1989, 105–6 and 127–8, and Elsner 2000, 89.
Hardie 2002, 165–72. The Dionysiac associations of Narcissus also receive particular emphasis in Hadot 1976.
For more on the theological significance of metamorphosis as a point of contact between the human and divine, see Barchiesi 2020, 14–15. This is not an absolute distinction, of course, since Tiresias, on his way to vatic status, has learned how to transform himself, or more specifically to travel back to an original form—as a result he can compare the experiences of both his original gender and of women. For more on such ‘self-transformers’, see Fantham 1993.
On the connection between Narcissus and Bacchus, especially the link with the deceptive appearance of the god in the encounter with the sailors, see Rosati 1983, 17.
undique dant saltus multaque aspergine rorant
emerguntque iterum redeuntque sub aequora rursus
inque chori ludunt speciem lascivaque iactant
corpora et acceptum patulis mare naribus efflant. (3.683–6)
For an equivalent effect of Echo as a viewing presence in painted representations of Narcissus, see Elsner 2007, 170–2.
von Glinski 2012, 122.
For the effect of this contrast between image and substance on the portrayal of Narcissus’ desire, see Hardie 2002, 145–6.
Hardie 2002, 159: ‘Narcissus’ erotic thirst is aroused by simulacra that come from a literal body of water’.
The course of a wandering stream may not only figure his prone form ‘poured’ into his image (fusus, 3.438) but also reveal specifically the ‘error’ (3.431) that deceives his own eyes as it incites him.
Even Jove’s promise to Semele that, whatever she asks, she will suffer no ‘repulsam’ (3.289) anticipates the stories of both Echo and Narcissus.
See also the discussion of the thematic importance of water in the myth by Hadot 1976, 96–8, who concludes that water ‘symbolizes the Dionysiac element’ in the story.
See Bömer 1969, 588, for references.
If Acoetes is Bacchus, then, again like Narcissus, the figure of the young man whom he recognizes as divine within the story he tells would be himself. But the god’s self-recognition here would be in every respect self-conscious (the narrative is constructed as a warning for Pentheus; thus Acoetes, if Bacchus, could not be ignorant of his identity, as Narcissus was), and the identity of the god and ‘Acoetes’ becomes an expression of his divine nature and leads to the mutual salvation of Bacchus within Acoetes’ story, and of Acoetes in the frame narrative. By contrast, his audience, Pentheus, another foil to Narcissus both in his unwillingness to be captured by images and his inability to recognize the truth that lies within them, fails both to recognize his interlocutor as a god (and in Euripides’ version of the encounter, the god is also his double) and to credit the story he tells.
It is important to be clear from the start that all of the surviving paintings of Narcissus (of which Hodske 2007, 166–71, lists 52) are Fourth Style; therefore, every example discussed below post-dates Ovid’s poem, likely by some fifty years. According to Knox, the question of whether Ovid is to be regarded as the source of such images ‘must be assessed on a case to case basis’ (2014, 36), and Narcissus is one of his strongest cases because of what seems its sudden popularity—there are no earlier attested examples of the subject—and because many (but not all) bear witness to what may be an Ovidian innovation in the story, the presence of Echo (pp. 40–41). Moreover, Knox’ clinching argument for Ovidian influence on Pompeian painting programs is the creation of assemblages that combine demonstrably literary, indeed Ovidian, allusions (pp. 47–51), and both of the Narcissus paintings discussed below appear in such contexts. Colpo 2007, 77–9, makes an even stronger claim than Knox, arguing also that Narcissus’s pose in the paintings precisely corresponds to Ovid’s description, but without taking account of the reverse possibility that Ovid is describing a painting. The debate about the direction of influence between Ovid and visual representations of his subjects, however, is a very old one, and Laslo’s 1935, 375–78, summary of earlier positions is still useful. His assumption that both Ovid and the painters whose works survive drew on Alexandrian sources, verbal and visual, that were themselves in dialogue, encourages him to posit visual influences for Ovid’s poetry even where earlier artistic depictions do not survive or are not attested. Laslo also stresses the documented references to paintings and sculpture within Ovid’s poetry as evidence of his engagement with these media. And especially in the Narcissus episode, Ovid makes explicit comparisons to works of art (3.419) and, perhaps, embeds allusions to art theory (3.484). Also, although some of the latter paintings contain Echo, not all of them do, and others show figures like Eros, who was present in Konon’s narrative but is never mentioned in Ovid’s. And Wallace-Hadrill (2018) has recently challenged Knox’ argument that the Metamorphoses provides a source for these proliferating paintings of shared subjects on the grounds that they differ too much from Ovid’s descriptions. He proposes instead that while the owners’ choice of subjects may well have been influenced by their reading of Ovid, the painters would likely have based their work on pre-existing visual types rather than on direct knowledge of his text. While this conclusion no longer requires the same level of literacy among visual artists, it also exposes the potential philological biases in Knox’ claims about the dependency of artistic images on literary sources. His cultural elevation of individual artists threatens to obscure the importance of independent traditions of visual representations of mythological subjects. Hodske himself connects the sudden popularity of Narcissus not with literary tastes but erotic ones, specifically a new preference for naked portraits of adolescent males (2007, 51) after the chaster subjects of the Third Style; for him, Narcissus is less an illustration of Ovid than a formal equivalent to Cyparissus, whose body is displayed in exactly the same pose. Finally, the programs in which these paintings appear, as in the House of Octavius Quartio, can be read as much more than literary assemblages. Thus Platt 2002 argues for a religious, specifically Isiac, significance to this choice of scenes. While such re-purposing of subjects from the Metamorphoses can be construed as a brilliant act of reception, especially given the importance of various epiphanies of other divinities in the scenes featured, it also shows that there were many more influences at work in putting together even this most Ovidian visual suite of images. In sum, while I must allow for the possibility that any individual painted Narcissus responds to Ovid’s version of the story, this by no means rules out the influence of a purely visual tradition of representation that is at least equally important (paintings were not simply illustrations of texts), nor does it preclude Ovid’s own account having been informed by an awareness of Narcissus as an artistic subject as well as the visual potential of the narrative itself.
In the epithet (Oedipodioniae) Pythagoras uses for Thebes at 15.429.
For the figurative presence of the mask in the subsequent narrative, that of Actaeon, whose relationship to his appearance, thanks to the metamorphosis effected by Diana, resembles that between an actor and his mask, see Gildenhard and Zissos 1999, 173, and the discussion of Hardie 2002, 169.
Calame 2005, 104–18, esp. pp. 114–5.
For Zanker, who considers the ‘self-conscious’ Narcissus as a later variant of the youth who does not recognize his image, the only secure indication of the date of the change in the myth is the development of a characteristic gesture of self-exposure in the visual iconography of the figure. He dates this change to the late Hellenistic period (p.168) and therefore sees it as reflected in Ovid’s narrative rather than originating with it.
This analysis draws from and I hope complements the thesis of Elsner 1996 that ‘the story of Narcissus combines two self-deceptions crucial to the dynamics of naturalism’ (p. 249= Elsner 2007, 136–7) in believing both that the image is real and that it is himself.
Also observed by Bartsch 2006, 95 n.121, citing Balensiefen 1990, 50–54 and 83–84.
On this phenomenon in paintings of Narcissus, see Elsner 2007, 167–8.
For the debate about the identity of the owner of this house, also attributed to Loreius Tiburtinus, see Platt 2002, 108 n.7.
See the account of Platt 2002, 91–2.
Elsner 2007, 155–60.
On such assemblages, see Knox 2014, 41–51. Platt 2002 gives a full analysis of this visual program as an exploration of the epiphanic power of viewing, with many references to its points of contact with Ovid’s narratives.
Elsner 2007, 160.
Valladares 2012, 384. See also Elsner 2007, 168, with earlier citations, and Platt 2002, 92–3.
Hales 2007, 338. The entire article well explores the significance of Dionysiac viewing in Pompeian houses, treating Dionysiac imagery as transformative rather than merely decorative. Platt’s (2002) interpretation of the visual program in this house focuses rather on the figure of Isis.
Elsner 2007, 160.
By site director Massimo Osanna, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/world/europe/pompeii-narcissus-fresco.html.
One referee rightly points out the incongruity of a tragic mask becoming the source of desire. And yet in other ways as well the signs of grief and madness in the scene are translated into aesthetically ravishing visual images. This is, after all, the moment when Narcissus’ beating of his breast produces the exquisite visual effect of contrasting red and white that in turn evokes naturalistic painting (3.480–90). Similarly, the wasting away of his body (3.492) that results from the sight of this beauty seems not only to create another sort of doubled sign (note especially the draining of color, 3. 491), but renders somewhat surprising the persistence of the caput he lays in the green grass. This reduction of a body to a head anticipates in a different register the fate of Pentheus, whose final appearance in the poem is as a torn-off head, embraced by his mother Agave (avulsumque caput, 3.727). And this is in turn a visual premonition of the scene in the Bacchae where Agave enters with a thyrsus bearing that head, which would surely have been a represented by a mask (1165ff.).
‘And his form is returned back to him, rendered obscure by the movement of the lake’. The echo comes in the distorted repetition of rediit in reddita.
florem occurs in the same line position, six lines later, and the resemblance to forma is heightened in the next line, when the flower is broken down into its constituent foliis. Folium is attested to mean pages of a book no earlier than Suet. frag. 135.6; however, the content of that fragment, a dispute about whether this use derives from the likeness of pages to leaves or from their being made from animal skins (follibus), suggests that this meaning was at least available earlier.
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas. For the deforming play on the Greek title Metamorphoses, see Wheeler 2009, 149, and note Ovid’s own later references to the poem as mutatae … formae (Trist. 1.1.117) and carmina mutatas hominum dicentia formas (Trist. 1.7.13); see Hinds 1985.
Butler 2011, 77. He is here speaking specifically of the tablet, whose waxy substance provides a direct point of comparison to the material of encaustic painting, but he had previously spoken of how even papyrus ‘is neither flat nor smooth’ (pp. 75–6).
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