For the first of my video-journeys exploring the world of the Arts (at the end of the article) I have chosen Narcissus, a painting attributed to the most controversial artist of the period between the end of 16th and beginning of 17th centuries: Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio. The artwork is at the Ancient Art Gallery of Palazzo Barberini.

The reason why I have chosen this painting lies in that particular mythological story taken as a metaphor by our  current psychologists to denounce a social as well as personal psychologic problem: the western widespread narcissistic personality. And most of the time they denouce this problem as there is no solution with it.

However, the painting I am telling you about in the herebelow video seems to give us a diffent point of view, a different solution even  from the one provided in the third book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As, even after centuries, our present culture of narcissism – necessary to our liberal and neoliberal system – seems called upon to surrender in order to free itself from the grips of its own tentacles.

Already in the 1970s, in his wonderful book entitled The culture of Narcissism (1979, W.W. Norton & Company), the American historian and sociologist Christofer Lasch  denounced the widespreading of this phenomenon in every sector of American society. In the book he analyses how useful the phenomenon is in guaranteeing more solidity and strength to the voracious productive-consumerist image of the Western World. The carnefice-victim dynamics, even inside families – who were freeing themselves from the 19th-century patriarchal structure to develop an increasingly more nuclear and consuming identity – appeared to be the best in order to increase the level of personal and social insecurity. This would raise the potential (but not necessarily the power) of purchasing and consequently of production. Any individual would have unconsciously been induced to exasperate their need to create their own mask already in adolescence, and make it more and more solid for the rest of their life when confronting with others. An exercise that would have distracted anyone from their own spiritual interiority. The consequent arising inner emptiness would certainly cause the disease of human desiring nature in anyone, directing the personal as well as collective desire towards matter. A desire which becomes prevaricating, often perverse and compulsive. A form of addiction that could only be overcome (?) with psychotropic drugs.

Consequently some people have missed of developping empathy (when you put yourself in someone else’s position and feel what they might feel) and compassion (when you may feel and want to help the other person) whereas others have increased these two feelings eccessively. And it is difficult to say that those who have been reached by too much empathy are free from narcissism. That is exactly the opposite! Even too much empathy normally has its narcissistic side. Of course, all this was foreseen and studied by the “great of the earth” who saw in a general derangement inimaginable profits.

You will object, I’m sure, that even in Caravaggio’s time, narcissistic culture reigned supreme in the Western world. And the objection makes perfect sense. It is no coincidence that the painting I have chosen deals with this topic. However, at Caravaggio’s time it was mostly confined to the high ranking world: aristocracy and ecclesiastical world. In these two ranks of the society the care of the mask was a way of thinking, living and acting, if they wanted to maintain a certain role in the others’ imagination. This would have made them able to deceive and better use those people who did not belong to one of the two ranks, or, if they did, demonstrated they did not “have what it takes”.

In any case, today this culture has reached unsustainable levels, having turned  everyone against. An image culture that today vomits all its inconsistency, exactly like that fleeting image of the mythical Narcissus who was mirroring himself in the water. He lost then for ever the possibility of growing emotionally as a man and was segregated to the gehenna of a perpetual adolescence and in perpetual run-away from the responsibility of his own self. And still worse, in perpetual dependence on anything keeps him away from himself: person, group, institution, work, money, sport, alcohol, drugs, etc.

Therefore, it seems that our teen-ager Narcissus-West World has already fallen into the waters of the pond, and is trying to resist at all costs. Unfortunately though it also seems that the treacherous waters are already sucking him in and the fight for him has become hard. His fate then seems sealed: Narcissus-West World, both on a personal and collective level, will have to face death. But death is always regenerative. We wonder then whether the regeneration of our Narcissus-West-World decides to follow the path of the Narcissus told in Ovid’s third book of the Methamorphosis, where he is transformed into a joyful flower but in perennial fleetingness.

Or if he decides to look for awareness on the path of transmutation for a full of light, from Nigredo to Rubedo, like the one the artist’s brush offers from the black background around Narcissus in the upper register to the reddish patina in the lower register of the artwork. That is why I firmly believe that no other artist of the time was of such a complex spirital calibre as Caravaggio was to be able to paint an artwork of such an animic depth like the above mentioned.

Furthermore, to support the attribution to the “murderer”, “cursed and swordsman” artist, I propose in the video an enjoyable exercise of comparison with another painting by Caravaggio’s sure hand, the Penitent Magdalene of the Doria-Pamphilj Gallery (1596-7, Rome). The two artworks were painted in the same period.

Not only. In the meantime, while you are listening to my interpretation of the painting, I also propose you go even further by making a fervent connection with the current time… because art is art when it becomes a universal message, crosses the centuries and always teaches!…

I then leave you with the video and ask you to subscribe to the YouTube channel, click like and share  the article or only the video in order to help me give visibility to this intense work of research and interdisciplinary study in art. I also advise you that the video is in Italian, so please activate the English translation on your screen. And eventually, please enjoy the video: