I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing1

“A a child, they could not keep me from wells,” wrote Seamus Heaney in his version of the Narcissus myth. “I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells / of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.” In countless versions, the ancient myth strikes a universal chord: person sees self, meets death. Ovid told of handsome Narcissus and Echo, the nymph who fell in love when she saw him “chasing frightened deer into his nets.” Rejected, she wasted away, until nothing was left but her voice, “heard by all.” He, “Tired from both his enthusiasm for hunting and from the heat,” rested a spell, caught glimpse of his refl ection in a pool of water, and fell in love with “all the things for which he himself is admired.” Unable to tear himself from the fateful refl ection, he too wasted away. At this spot later sprouted narcissus, the fl ower. Favored by poet and artist alike, the story intrigues anyone who searches for or reconstructs the self. In art, variations abound, among them one by the great Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). Contrary to the conventions of his age, he painted directly from posed models, a practice that cultivated a new relationship between painting and viewer by promoting art not as fi ction but as an extension of everyday experience, the physical content enriched with psychological tension. Gerard van Kuijl, Dutch painter and follower of Caravaggio, might have seen the master’s Narcissus (1597) when he lived in Rome from 1629 to 1631. In the 17th century, many artists from the northern Low Countries worked abroad or were infl uenced by others who had traveled and returned, bringing new styles to the local market. Their work strayed from the polders, woods, and dunes of the Dutch Golden Age to the biblical and secular, with human fi gures dominating the canvas. These artists exerted a lasting infl uence by introducing one of the main currents of baroque art into the Netherlands. The Caravaggists were mainly artists from Utrecht, who visited Italy and worked in the style of Caravaggio, characterized