Narcissus, in effect, painted himself when he saw his reflected image in the water.(6) The principle underlying the proverbial saying informed Vasari's Lives of the artists - for example, the "life" of Piero di Cosimo, who, painting a primordial humanity, is said to have been himself a "savage" person.(7) No matter that Piero, whose work was highly cultivated and saturated with sophisticated Ovidian subjects, could pun in Latin, as he did in his Mars and Venus, where he played on the cuniculus (rabbit) near Venus's
cunnus (pudendum).