Description

Bacchus is the god of wine, madness and ecstasy often appears in scenes of revelry and licentiousness. In his Bacchus, Caravaggio shows the god as a seventeenth-century Italian teenager, offering the viewer wine, spoiled fruit and perhaps something more. The basket of fruit in the Bacchus is sometimes interpreted as a vanitas. As was generally the case with Caravaggio’s works, Bacchus is striking for the artist’s careful attention to realistic detail.