The Portrait of a Mirror

by A. Natasha Joukovsky

  Jack Howard had been observing this interaction with waning interest and increasingly at a distance, having leaned into an aside with Parker Remington that was now approaching a full-blown separate discussion.

  —Oh, so you went to Sill, Dale said, feeling a sense of relief at the distance of removal, moderated by the minor resentment of Wes’s primacy in the history of his fiancée’s life.

  —The Sill School in Connecticut? Greg Templeton verified. You don’t say! My daughter is going into her fifth-form year there.

  Everyone’s faces lit up with the same inflated expression of giving a shit and made the appropriate nods of vague undeserved congratulation, attempting to hide the extent to which they were now more interested in the contents of Jack and Parker’s private conversation. The frustration of having to socially perform had been exacerbated by the departure of the primary audience of import. The only follow-up questions Dale wanted to ask in present company were all for Wes, and squarely prohibited within the social mores of a business conversation, not to mention by his personal sense of pride and dignity. No, he must appear entirely apathetic to Wes’s casual acquaintance with Vivien. It could not possibly be more intimate, Dale assured himself, than the relationship he shared with Wes’s wife. The close association with Diana that Dale had previously sought to downplay and even hide he now looked rather forward to highlighting. She’ll be here any minute now, Dale mused smugly, wondering if Wes even knew she wasn’t in Philadelphia. Probably not. Diana certainly had no idea her husband would be here. Unexpectedly having the benefit of asymmetric information tip in his favor felt like a kind of triumph over their marriage, and Dale basked in the anticipation of Wes’s—not to mention Diana’s—surprise.

  Only one nettlesome thought gave him pause: notoriously resilient breed, right, Dale? Julian Pappas-Fidicia might be accused of many personal failings, but linguistic imprecision was not among them. Perhaps Wes had no idea that Dale knew Diana, but Julian certainly had an inkling—more than an inkling, it sounded like. Dale had never mentioned anything about Horace’s brush with death to him, but Diana well might have. If so, and knowing that they both worked at Portmanteau, Dale’s arrival with Horace would have been enough inferential information: Julian loved drama so much that if anything, it would be his tendency to over-infer. As much as Dale generally preferred to leave the choice of topic to others in competitive circular social clusters, in this instance it was essential he steer the conversation clear of any mention of Diana before she could present herself. But Prudence jumped in before he had the chance:

  —That’s sensible of you to send your daughter away to school, Greg. I’m sure it’ll make it easier for her to accept your divorce.

  Several eyebrows involuntarily popped up, but Julian Pappas-Fidicia’s were joined by the sides of his lips. You wouldn’t have thought it to look at her, but Prudence Hyman was his kind of woman.

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  —Oka-a-y, intoned Vivien Floris, beckoning her audience away from the towering mirror and toward Nicolas Poussin’s Narcissus Lamented by Echo and Eros.

  She should have realized this would be a particularly avid group of selfie-ists: such an assemblage of privileged, well-educated American Millennials, all looking their personal best. Even those whose feet brought them toward the Poussin weren’t paying attention to it. Their eyes were locked on their smartphones, evaluating which of the fifteen or twenty hyper-mimetic images they’d just taken was most suitable for social media, tagging @imetovidsheirs, tagging Vivien herself even. In her curatorial quest to demonstrate Ovid’s outsized contemporary cultural relevance, this was precisely the behavior she had knowingly, expressly incentivized, but even Vivien had been unprepared for just how well her conceit would work. That was always the problem with incentives, though. Not that they didn’t work, but that they worked only too well. Vivien enlisted her most resonant voice again:

  —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. If you can look up from your phones now, you’ll see firsthand the fate of those who can’t. Here, in Poussin’s painting from 1630, generously loaned to us by the Louvre, we find Narcissus captured at a later moment in the story—just after the first-ever “death-by-selfie,” if you will.

  This turn of phrase garnered a few chortles, and several guests moved to get a closer look at the painting. Vivien stepped to the side and smoothed her dress: a short-sleeved mini in geometric white lace, sheer at the shoulder and fitted through the hip, blossoming at the hem into a controlled, peplumesque flare. It was from her new favorite label, a rising upmarket contemporary brand called Self-Portrait, whose distinctive blend of militaristic precision and ultra-feminine detailing had acutely appealed to Vivien even before she’d discovered its oh-so-apropos name.

  —It’s a challenging ask of Poussin, to visually communicate death and beauty at the same time, and he navigates it flawlessly. Yes, please, get closer. The details are just gorgeous. Look at Narcissus, bare-chested, his garment torn in grief, as Ovid tells us. He appears as if living in death; if you look carefully, you can see the narcissus flowers already sprouting at his head, his metamorphosis under way. And what about Echo? Look at the way she fades into the rock with escalating transparence; see the detail of her ribbony shoes, left empty.

  Vivien pointed out these little flourishes avidly; half-turning toward the painting, obviously tickled by its beauty herself. As her audience cycled through their turns to scrutinize the picture, Vivien turned to scrutinize her audience. The colorful varieties in toilette and plumage collectively painted a pleasingly uniform tableau. There was one exception, however. An outlier. She was very young, but between the overprocessed blond hair and simple white shift dress possessed the aesthetic overlay of someone far older. Vivien looked attentively at this simple dress. She knew what such simplicity meant and what money was paid for it. The girl hadn’t been there at the start of the tour—Vivien would have noticed. There was something unplaceably familiar about her, Vivien thought, and an arresting intensity to her gaze. After examining the Poussin, the young woman turned and focused the same unblinking gaze, framed by its giant dark eyebrows, squarely on Vivien, as if she herself had been a painting. There was the suggestion, if not the actual formation, of a smile. Vivien returned it with deliberate placidity, and continued her talk:

  —Despite the way Narcissus treated her, Echo is filled with pathos for him in Ovid’s final scene: She was sorry for him now, he says, though angry still, remembering; you could hear her answer “Alas!” in pity, when Narcissus cried out “Alas!” You could hear her own hands beating her breast when he beat his. “Farewell, dear boy, beloved in vain!” were his last words, and Echo called the same words to him.

  Vivien paused dramatically.

  —Farewell, dear boy, beloved in vain! For those of you who are dating, by the way, this is a great line to use when someone is ghosting you over text.

  Many laughs, but the girl in white was immutable, and Vivien blushed.

  —Anyway, even within such a story of solipsism, fundamentally about negating and negated love, there is this remarkable shadow strain of genuine feeling—of, dare I say it, unselfishness: Narcissus grieves for—he laments—the death of the boy in the pool, just as Echo laments him. This idea of lamentation is central to Poussin’s painting. Recall that we still haven’t talked about the third figure in the scene. That’s right, Cupid. Iconographically speaking, he’s the most important. Cupid’s presence in the composition, flanking Narcissus on the other side of Echo, joining her in mourning him, uncannily mirrors another lamentation painting, one from a century earlier by Paris Bordone, which you can see at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. Bordone’s painting isn’t of Narcissus, though. It’s of Jesus Christ.

  Many raised eyebrows,
but the girl in white’s dropped lower. She was precariously close to smiling.

  —Bordone’s Jesus lies prone in precisely the same position and state of undress as Narcissus here, with two grieving angels, one at the head, the other at the feet, as described not by Ovid, but in the biblical book of John. The two paintings are similar enough that in another era, Bordone might have been inclined to sue for copyright infringement. You laugh, but I assure you the enlightened elite of Poussin’s own time would have easily made the association—and understood the audacity of the symbolism. Namely this: that Narcissus, a fatally flawed human being, is worthy of Christ-level lamentation; that is, that mortal and divine tragedy exist on the same plane, and should be awarded the same pathos. If anything, Poussin is trying to one-up Bordone, to give Narcissus an even grander funeral. Please keep in mind here, Cupid may look like an angel, with those precious little wings—but Cupid is a god. This painting depicts nothing short of a god mourning a human; specifically, a god mourning the “father of painting”; a god mourning not just any human, but a god mourning an artist. You’ll notice Poussin’s implication here is a pretty self-serving one: that art offers a mortal path to immortality to be revered even by immortals, and as the creator of a painting such as this one, this path logically extends to Poussin himself. Thus the artistic apotheosis—the deification—that Narcissus achieves in this scene is mirrored by Poussin’s own in depicting it. As with Caravaggio’s Narcissus, the conceit within and outside of the painting is the same. There is an echo here and now, in physical space—and we the viewers play no small part in it. Because really, what greater proof could there be of Poussin’s mortal immortality than the fact that almost four centuries after his death, we’re all still standing here in awe of his work? Is there anything that the bright individualistic ego—mortal or immortal—craves more?

  —Caviar blini? the server offered, holding out the tray of hors d’oeuvres to the group on the terrace.

  —Oh, yes please, Julian replied, leering over the tray, his deliberating fingers wavering to select the choicest morsel. And then, before the server could abscond, another.

  —In my view, he continued, you can never have too much caviar.

  • • •

  —If you think this view is a stretch, said Vivien down in the gallery, consider that Poussin painted Narcissus not one, but four times. In addition to this picture there’s a scene from earlier in Ovid’s narrative in private collection and, in Dresden, The Realm of Flora, a thematic painting, where Narcissus appears centrally, surrounded by other characters who undergo similar floral metamorphoses elsewhere in the poem. Then here in the US, at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, you can see The Birth of Bacchus—a strange tableau, and one that again grants Narcissus exalted status by juxtaposing his death with the birth of a god. There are facsimiles of all of these images in the section label to your right, and I encourage you to look at them after the tour, but the main points I want to emphasize in relation to his lamentation are these: first, that Narcissus was, if not an obsession, then at least a keenly fascinating subject for Poussin; and second, that Poussin’s symbolic insistence on redemptive mortal-immortal artistic metamorphosis persists across his works. This theme is consistent with Ovid’s text as well: Even in Hell, Ovid says, Narcissus found a pool to gaze in, watching his image in the Stygian water, while in the world above, his naiad sisters mourned him, and dryads wept for him, and Echo mourned as they did, and wept with them. Even the immortal shadow of Narcissus clearly hasn’t learned his lesson, and yet still he is worthy of pathos, of redemption, even from those whom he has harmed most. I guess you could say that if Narcissus ends up more a devil than a god, he’s at least the kind of devil with whom you’d sympathize.

  —Deviled egg, anyone? asked another server on the roof.

  —Don’t mind if I do, said Julian, carefully transferring the lamb lollipop he was in the process of consuming to his other hand, failing to account for its new proximity to Horace.

  —No! Horace, no! Bad boy! Prudence chastised the dog, whose tiny jaws had managed to swipe a not insubstantial bite.

  —Gracious, Prudence continued as the gristled bone fell. I’m terribly sorry, Julian.

  —No apology necessary, said Julian promptly, surprisingly unfazed, as the damage had been borne entirely by a crevasse in Huyghe’s floor installation, to the salvation of Julian’s pristine white pants.

  —You’re a clever little thing, aren’t you! Wes exclaimed.

  He rubbed Horace’s head fondly, laughing with enough good nature that Prudence couldn’t resent him for it, but not quite enough for Dale not to.

  —We can get Julian another little lamb lollipop, can’t we?

  —Still, I’m not sure what’s gotten into him, Prudence insisted apologetically. He knows better than do be so rude. Don’t you, Horace?

  Horace did not immediately respond for comment.

  —He has a strong survival instinct, Julian assured her. Honestly? I can respect that. I’m almost inclined to admire his tenacity—

  —you’re almost inclined to admire his tenacity, continued Vivien. At least Narcissus is consistent, pursuing his vainglorious folly even in hell like that. There’s something about the depiction of love, I think—even in its most dysfunctional varieties—that inclines us toward generosity, toward empathy, even. I hung this painting across from Gérôme’s Pygmalion and Galatea to illustrate this point: they’re mirror images. The myth of Pygmalion, of a great artist coaxing his marble sculpture into flesh and blood, is, remember, a birthing story—of idyllic “true love” bringing art to life. The death of Narcissus, meanwhile, illustrates precisely the opposite metamorphosis, where the dysfunctional, fatally flawed love of a metaphorical artist nevertheless has the power to transform life into art.

  Vivien made metered eye contact with her audience, forcing herself not to linger on the girl in white, even as she felt the girl’s eyes linger on her.

  —Ironically, it’s this inverted narrative that hits on the more fundamentally human desire. Forget the stunning frequency with which Narcissus is depicted in the history of art. If you pay attention, you can spot echoes of the myth everywhere in our society today. It has been inextricably woven into the tapestry of our Western cultural consciousness, ingrained so seamlessly that we often fail to notice it. Poussin couldn’t have predicted the “selfie” per se, but I can promise you he would have understood its appeal. For he, too, longed to render the impermanent permanent, the mortal immortal; from life: art. He would have understood the selfie, yes—he would have loved and been afraid of it. With that, I’ll leave you free to snap a few more of your own, if you dare. Thank you very much for your attention and for your support of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; I do hope you enjoyed the tour, and bid you an evening to remember.

  Diana Whalen held her position after the audience dispersed, allowing two other patrons to ask Vivien questions, listening with her eyes to the curator’s replies, studying her body, the musculature of her limbs, the movement of her dress as she gestured, the overwhelming sophistication of its delicate strength. Vivien Floris was the sort of woman who seemed so perfect she almost failed to pass the Turing test, the most impressive aspect of her algorithm being her apparent unconsciousness of her algorithm’s effect. It was an art so well practiced, Diana recognized, that it had crossed into second nature.

  —What a powerful exhibition, Diana declared, by way of introduction. You make it look effortless now, but I’m sure it required a great deal of work to actualize.

  Vivien blushed prettily as the two women stepped toward each other, coming face to face. With Diana in heels and Vivien in flats, they were just about the same height.

  —The best art, they say, is that which conceals art, Vivien purred in an intimate mezzo piano. It’s the best compliment, too, so thank you. And you’re right—it did. Require a great deal of work to actualize, that is. When you’re talking about two Caravaggios, a Bernini, and a Poussin, the nego
tiations get complicated. Any one of them might command a solo tour.

  —Who is the “they” you’re referring to there—the “they” that says the best art conceals art? Ovid?

  —Very close. The entire line is from Ovid, but he doesn’t actually specify who the “they” is.

  —Perhaps the “they” is “us,” suggested Diana.

  —You’ve been paying attention—or . . . forgive me, but you look so familiar—have we met? Did you go to Penn? Were you in the Art History department?

  —No, I didn’t go to Penn.

  —My mistake; there’s just something about your manner, I guess—

  —We all see ourselves in other people, said Diana impishly. It’s generally the chief thing that we like about them.

  —Aha! Too true. You should do my next tour for me.

  —Oh, I’m hardly qualified for that; art history isn’t my thing—though I must say, I do understand why you so love the Poussin.

  —Yes, Vivien said, turning fondly toward the painting. He’s my second-favorite Narcissus.

  —Only your second-favorite?

  Vivien gestured toward the Caravaggio, or rather, toward the mirror image of the Caravaggio.

  —You did give him prime real estate in here, Diana said. And don’t get me wrong, I understand the decision. He’s beautiful. So lifelike.

  Vivien nodded knowingly.

  —He seems, I’ve always thought, to surpass life in its imitation.

  —Yes, that’s just it! Diana concurred, excitedly. He’s such a real man that he’s more real than any real man can be. This may seem like a non sequitur, but have you read Anna Karenina? I just finished it, and the Caravaggio makes me feel like Levin, looking at the portrait of Anna. Still, I have to say, I’m surprised you don’t prefer the Poussin.

  —Why is that?

  —Because Poussin’s Narcissus is a dead ringer for your fiancé.