The Portrait of a Mirror

by A. Natasha Joukovsky

  ART &

  MYTH:

  OVID’

  SHEIRS

  A few feet to the right he found the prologue:

  “My intention is to tell of bodies changed To different forms . . .”

  OVID, METAMORPHOSES

  Art, in its broadest sense, is perhaps our only real chance for apotheosis. It is not through life, but rather its mimesis, its artistic mirror, that we glimpse the possibility of living forever. This idea originates with Homer, whose heroes perform glorious acts in the hope of being immortalized in song, but is perfected in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an epic tribute to transformation—and fundamentally, to art itself. First published in A.D. 8, Metamorphoses ambitiously chronicles the history of the world from creation to the deification of Julius Caesar by weaving together transformational stories from the canon of Classical Mythology. Tales of boys turning into flowers, of men into stone—many of them already well-established in Ovid’s day—build toward the most alluring transformation of all: of a human being into a god.

  Renaissance author Leon Battista Alberti held mythic Narcissus, lovingly transfixed by his own image, to be “the father of painting”; Medusa might be similarly deemed the original sculptor. Her foil is Pygmalion, whose Ovidian rendition is curiously similar to anecdotes of the historical, if legendary, realist prodigies Zeuxis, Giotto, and Bernini. It is then, perhaps, no surprise that Ovid’s epic has become one of the most influential works of Western art: the Metamorphoses not only deifies Caesar, it deifies Ovid. It provides a successful, unabashedly derivative road map to artistic apotheosis, and an ideal source for subsequent derivation. “Art & Myth: Ovid’s Heirs” is one small slice of this story, a single chapter in this connective narrative of connection. The late Renaissance, with its innovative, transformational underpinnings (and its kindred consequent movements of ebullient Classicism and celebration of individual achievement), provided particularly fertile ground not only for the depiction of metamorphic mythic artists—Medusa, Pygmalion, Narcissus—but specifically for Ovid’s description of them; for meta-metamorphic, expressly recursive Ovidian visual art.

  The exhibition is made possible by Mercury Incorporated.

  It was organized in conjunction with The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

  It positively reeked of Julian. There was something of a bard in Wes’s chief operating officer, a fundamental humanism underneath his exaggerated intellectual hauteur and comically abject elitism. And “expressly recursive”? How could Julian resist. To understand recursion, you have to understand recursion, he told anyone who asked what he did for a living. And he was always on the lookout for ways to aggrandize Ecco’s cultural significance. This kind of self-promotion, rife with lay metaphor, had always had an icky lubricity for Wes, the aerie perspective of someone who, with a knack for finding people like Julian only too happy to do it for him, never had any need of it. The name Ecco itself had been Julian’s too, of course—and it was he who had insisted on the two c’s so that the second might be vertically reflected. Any graphic designer worth their bacon would connect them almost intuitively into the symbol for infinity then break it—which was exactly what their graphic designer did, cutely rendering a near-palindrome by going all lowercase. It was so, too, almost offensively literal—obnoxiously clever. But it was the kind of reduction that put corporate procurement departments at maximal ease, the kind of reduction Julian was a genius at. Wes wondered sometimes, not infrequently, if he relied on him a little too much. Julian was, besides his COO, his sounding board, frequently his personal psychologist, and probably also his best friend.

  Wes turned the corner, passing through a corridor before making a left into the main room of the exhibition. There, at the back of the group: Julian Pappas-Fidicia, dressed like a parody of Julian Pappas-Fidicia. Madras shirt, fuchsia pants; a navy blazer with golden-fleece-emblazoned brass buttons draped consciously over his fleshy shoulder. Julian stood upright, one hand in his pants pocket but sans contrapposto, top-heavily well fed but not obese. A monogrammed L.L.Bean canvas tote bag—known by Wes to be one of Julian’s “dress” tote bags—occupied his other hand, falling past his slightly knocked knees and almost to his velvet smoking slippers. His hair, well-combed and parted to the side, partially obscured the extent to which it had started running away from his face—which was spotless, clean shaven, and as youthful as a face over the age of thirty wearing horned-rim glasses can be. The overall effect was somewhere in the neighborhood of Paddington Bear at a gay club in Palm Beach.

  —Love the pants, Wes whispered, smiling wickedly, sneaking up behind him.

  —You’re fucking late, Julian quipped, so you can shut the fuck up.

  —Are they new?

  —Yes, actually—custom Paul Stuart. I picked them up yesterday after the brunch you missed, just like the first half of the tour.

  —So, five-hundred-dollar pink pants.

  —They were six hundred, and they are fuchsia. It was one of those situations where I went too far down the procurement path before asking how much they cost and it was too late to back out. But they do fit very well, and I like them very much.

  —I pay you too much.

  —Just be glad I’m not wearing the monocle.

  —Saving that for your gentlemen callers?

  Julian inhaled theatrically in mock offense, widening his eyes, jutting his jaw forward as he turned his head in slow motion, for the first time visually acknowledging Wes.

  —I’m going to file an HR complaint.

  —You’d never make more paperwork for yourself.

  Pursing his lips, tilting his head like a pug, Julian considered it.

  —That is actually a rather good point.

  Wes rocked back onto his heels.

  —Hm, sounds like you aren’t doing your job. I’d like to file an HR complaint.

  —Most of you are probably familiar with the myth of Narcissus, the curator was saying.

  —Will you shut the fuck up and listen to the lecture? Julian hissed. She’s talking about you.

  Wes mouthed a hah-hah but started paying attention, listening to the curator, looking up at the painting—it had been hung unusually high—and assumed the absorbed, craning body language of one who is seriously considering it.

  —Narcissus, the beautiful boy who falls in love with his own image. It’s a creation story for the eponymous flower perhaps better known in the US as a daffodil and the original source of our English word narcissism, meaning vanity or inordinate self-obsession. It’s a story that has long held a particular fascination for painters. There are literally thousands of depictions of Narcissus in the history of art, and we have two of the finest ever here in this exhibition—we’ll take a look at Poussin’s in a few minutes—but this one painted by Caravaggio just before the turn of the sixteen century is, in my mind, the most quintessentially Ovidian.

  The heads in front of Wes nodded as the curator paused briefly. She had one of those highish, gently lilting voices that seem feminine and soft even when clearly projecting. Allowing her audience to get as close as possible to the painting, she was standing off to the side and hidden behind six-foot-seven Joel Francis, a junior programmer at Ecco fresh off the Stanford basketball team. Wes couldn’t see her face.

  —Ovid’s version of the tale describes a pool, silver with shining water to which no shepherds came, no goats, no cattle, whose glass no bird, no beast, no falling leaf had ever troubled. You can feel this absolute stillness, the total calm of Ovid’s scene in the painting, in the surface of the water and the pitch-black shadows. We call this dramatic, low-fi-filter-like technique tenebroso, and many art historians posit that Caravaggio invented it. Then there’s the position of his body in the light, forming a circle as his hands meet his reflection’s, the left one disappearing as he dips in his arms to embrace the boy he sees there. And look at the craning of his neck and how his lips part—you can see that he’s about to try, again in Ovid’s words, to kiss the image in the water. Caravaggio ev
en foreshadows the tale’s conclusion with those voluminous, almost petally white shirtsleeves surrounding the dramatically foreshortened knee. If you squint, you can almost see Narcissus’s transformation into a flower with a yellow center surrounded with white petals. That knee, guys, I’ve got to tell you. If Narcissus here were alive, he’d have to get it insured by Lloyds of London. You would not believe how many scholarly articles have been written about that knee. If you’re ever in London, incidentally, you can go and see the work of a professional Caravaggio-knee appreciator by the name of Salvador Dalí. His Metamorphosis of Narcissus is in the Tate Modern, and owes a very heavy debt to the painting that you see.

  Julian nudged him, indicating that Wes should mentally file this as a Really Excellent Thing for Them to Do the Next Time They Were in London Together. Several of Ecco’s other employees seemed to have had the same thought as Julian and gave short, seizury nods to one another in that yes let’s go see that painting together but let’s talk about it later because an expert is talking and I’m actually into an expert lecture for once and, honestly, neither of us are likely to follow through because let’s be real going on a trip to London to see a painting with your best friend from work is one of those ideas that sounds good for, approximately, four seconds before it sounds like lunacy—but yeah, if I go to London someday and happen to go to the Tate Modern, in that scenario there is a nonzero chance I will actively look out for that painting, and if I do end up seeing it, then I will think of you sort of way. You know, those silent, tacit, wistful plans that are immediately backtracked and forgotten.

  —He’s a pretty handsome guy, right?

  The curator asked this, to more eyebrowish smiles and nods—Joel Francis was really enjoying himself. The curator must be pretty, Wes thought.

  —But don’t let Caravaggio’s pretty surfaces fool you, said the curator. At its depth, this is perhaps his most violent painting. Narcissus is caught here between pleasure and pain, desire and anguish. We have to remember that at the end of Ovid’s tale Narcissus begs the gods for death, he pleads to be forcibly released from the image he loves too much to voluntarily escape. By painting Narcissus, Caravaggio indefinitely prolongs this tension and pain, denying him transformation, capturing him at the pivotal moment he is captured by himself, as he looks in wonder, charmed by himself, spellbound, and no more moving than any marble statue. Those are the words Ovid uses, no more moving than any marble statue. Medusa might make you afraid to turn around—but Narcissus, when you think about it, is the more frightening image. Here the fear is in not turning around—and not, by the way, because you literally can’t, but because you don’t want to, because you don’t want to to the point that you’re willing to accept any and all consequences of continuing to look. Caravaggio wanted this painting to be as seductively beautiful to you as the pool is to Narcissus. And the painting is as far beyond your reach as the viewer as the image in the pool is for Narcissus within it. It’s really rather cruel. Caravaggio is again, as he did with his Medusa, trying to turn us into stone, into sculptures—into art. He’s again asking us to question our reality in favor of his, to override our self-interest, if not our very humanity. He wants us to fall in, to our detriment. But this time he’s asking us to ask for it. It’s a power move in a painting.

  She paused, letting that one sink in. There were appreciative “ahs” and chuckles. Wes kind of wished he hadn’t missed the first half of the tour.

  —But there’s someone here I haven’t even mentioned yet, someone I believe this group in particular will have a special affinity with—yes, that’s right, Echo, the pretty nymph who could only repeat the last thing said to her, who fell hopelessly in love with Narcissus and bore his callous rejection. Now before you say, “wait a minute, I don’t see a pretty nymph anywhere in this painting,” let’s go back to Ovid. When he describes Echo’s metamorphosis, Ovid says that she frets and pines, becomes all gaunt and haggard, her body dries and shrivels till voice only and bones remain, and then she is voice only for the bones are turned to stone.

  The curator paused.

  —For the bones are turned to stone, she reiterated. So, where is Echo in the paint—

  —She’s us! interrupted Joel Francis. We’re the Echo! And we’re Ecco!

  He smiled like a maniac. Julian inhaled deeply, wide-eyed with embarrassment. He looked at Wes as if he expected him to do something.

  —Right, that’s right! the curator replied with a laugh, not seeming to mind in the slightest, if anything delighted by Joel’s enthusiasm. And that Echo is itself an echo, too: an echo of Narcissus—no more moving than any marble statue; an echo of Ovid’s words in paint; an echo of Caravaggio’s own Medusa painted two years earlier; and today, as you say, an echo of Ecco with two c’s. There are Echoes in echoes; Eccos all over the place. It can get rather confusing, actually—although today I realize I’m lecturing to a group of experts on the subject, so I’m sure you all will be able to keep them straighter than I.

  —Yeah, but even the highest-IQ human brains can only process like six, maybe seven levels of recursion before meaning is rendered unstable, Joel Francis explained, trying to humbly offset the compliment and failing, in a tone that suggested he felt he’d already developed a deep personal rapport with the curator over the course of the tour.

  Julian seemed to be frantically searching for a prefrontal cortical fire extinguisher. Wes squeezed his shoulder firmly, reassuring him it was all right.

  The curator herself seemed unfazed by the interruption:

  —Well, you may need all of those levels today, because I have another one for you. If you haven’t already fallen too deeply into the painting, would you please turn around.

  On the back wall in parallel opposition to the Caravaggio she had installed a gargantuan, floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall, Versailles-style mirror, at least sixteen feet square. Joel Francis’s face lit up with game-show-contestant-level overenthusiasm. It became evident why Narcissus was hung so unusually high. The effect was breathtaking, reflecting the object and its admirers together—most prominently, as the stage had reversed, Wes, Julian, Joel, and—

  —Vivien Floris? Wes whispered aloud, looking at Julian, who seemed confused by his confusion.

  It was definitely her. All pencil-skirted and official-looking, blushing a bit in the glow of her audience’s admiration.

  How could the curator be Vivien Floris? Shy, quiet, self-conscious Vivien Floris? Wes realized that despite the wealth of material in his long-dormant-but-much-cherished Mental Catalogue of Images of Vivien Floris he had almost never heard her speak. He’d rarely even seen her speak to someone else—she had been, truly, that shy. And unapproachable. Really almost painfully pretty, vaguely out of the Jennifer Connelly–Megan Fox school, with freezing pale blue eyes and freckles, moody lips, and delicate features.

  Many of the Ecco employees, to Julian’s obvious dismay, had already taken out their cell phones and started posing, snapping mirror selfies of themselves with the painting.

  —You can relax, Julian, Vivien said warmly, smiling coyly as if they knew each other (in a new expression promptly added to the Mental Catalogue)—I wanted people to take pictures—please, yes, don’t be shy—take a selfie! Just no flash, please! And if you’re posting to Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram make sure to tag and follow the exhibition too—@imetovidsheirs. We’re reposting our favorites.

  The lecture all but disbanded as Wes’s employees diplomatically jousted for position at the mirror. Joel asked Vivien if she would get in his selfie and she graciously indulged him, smiling for the camera, her long hair exactly as Wes remembered it, falling in a smooth dark sheet as she leaned to the side. There was a flash of jealousy.

  —No flash, please!

  —How do you know her? Wes demanded as Julian got out his phone and dragged Wes to an unoccupied corner of the mirror for a selfie.

  —Um, she went to Penn with me. Could you please try to make a less-pained facial expression right now? I know
you can get away with that sort of thing, but be warned, I am posting this to Instagram. Oh my god, wait, no, don’t stop, wait you really look like him. Turn your head down and to the side. Oh my god, brilliant.

  —She was two years ahead of me at Sill.

  —Ugh, I should have known you were boarding school friends. The one percent is such a small place. Tell me, was there a single unattractive person who attended that school? Did you have to submit a headshot with your application?

  —I wouldn’t say we were friends, really. I mean, she was older. I had no idea she lived in New York.

  —She doesn’t. She’s a visiting curator from the Philadelphia Museum. This is the kind of thing you would know if you ever showed up on time for anything.

  —Oh, Wes said, with a tinge of disappointment, but also, for some reason, relief.

  Wes couldn’t stop looking at her, at how adulthood and mastery and professional success and confidence had and had not changed her. He studied the angles of her face, and noticed they’d sharpened with age. If anything, she was even better-looking now.

  —Well, we’ll be getting dinner tonight so I suppose I must invite you, Julian sighed.

  The idea that there was such a thing as a future tense broke Wes’s reverie.

  —What? No—I’m not sure she would even remember me.

  Vivien’s didactic “okay” with an extended “a” cut through the din of collective narcissism, indicating the group should regather in front of the Poussin. Most people continued taking photos, gradually recoalescing with Vivien’s playful derision:

  —Why try to catch an always fleeting image, poor credulous youngster? What you seek is nowhere, and if you turn away, you will take with you the boy you love. The vision is only shadow, only reflection, lacking any substance. It comes with you, it stays with you, it goes away with you, if you can go away.

  It was all from memory, Wes realized as he watched her talk.