Liriope bringing Narcissus before Tiresias

This imposing canvas depicting Liriope bringing Narcissus before Tiresias is a fine work by the highly idiosyncratic Venetian artist, Giulio Carpioni. A pupil of Alessandro Varotari, known as Il Padovanino, Carpioni is thought to have travelled to Rome at an early stage in his career. He developed an original and instantly recognisable style that assimilated influences from both the Caravaggesque Venetian works of Carlo Saraceni and Jean LeClerc, and the group of Veronese painters active in Rome that included Alessandro Turchi, Pasquale Ottino, and Marcantonio Basetti.

This is one of several treatments of a relatively recondite subject which the artist clearly had some success with. Pilo lists four other pictures of the subject: the upright picture dated to c. 1671, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; the picture in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice; the largest, in Palazzo Negri de Salvi, Casarotti and a fourth in a private collection, but not known to the author (G.M. Pilo, Carpioni, Venice, 1961, p. 126, fig. 184; p. 113; p. 124 and p. 102). Another is in a private collection in Vicenza (see M. Binotto, La pittura nel Veneto, Il Seicento, Milan, 2000, I, p. 305, fig. 384). These five pictures have generally been dated to the 1670s and are likely to post-date the present canvas.

Taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book III: verses 339-510), this work shows the river nymph Liriope taking her son, the beautiful Narcissus, to the blind seer Tiresias to enquire about his destiny. Tiresias pronounced that the child would live a long life so long as he did not ‘come to know himself’. After spurning the infatuated mountain nymph Echo, Narcissus was condemned by Juno to gaze perpetually at his own reflection in a pool of water, a fate that resulted in his death and transformation into the flower that still bears his name.