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The significance of this hypnotizing self-portrait is best sought in its symbolism, although that is anything but straightforward. In one sense Bacchus is an apt alter ego for an artist, because according to his legend he is subject to fits of divine inspiration. Caravaggio was not the first painter to associate himself with the god of wine. In Borromean Milan, the city of his upbringing, a group of painters, including the well-known artist and theorist Gian Paolo Lomazzo, had formed a mock-academy dedicated to the cult of Bacchus. The young Caravaggio’s appropriation of the same Bacchic symbolism may have been his way of announcing his strong sense of his own capabilities, in which case there may have been an element of personal manifesto involved in the play-acting. It is tempting to imagine that he painted this truculent picture to show Giuseppe Cesari that he could be much more than a hack studio assistant.

While Bacchus symbolizes inpiration, he also stands for disorder, anarchy, an unruly surrender to the senses. He is passion, opposed to the reason embodied by Apollo. He is the enemy of civilization, capable of laying waste to an entire society: in Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae he destroys Thebes by luring its people into the mountains to join in his revels. The city’s outraged king, Pentheus, is torn limb from limb by the god’s intoxicated female followers, the Bacchantes. Pentheus’ mother, Agave, is at their forefront, bearing her son’s head aloft in triumph. In her ecstasy she sees him as a lion, fit to be slaughtered.

The madness and the maenadism associated with the myth had been painted most memorably – and most disconcertingly – by Titian in his celebrated Bacchus and Ariadne, now in London’s National Gallery. As Bacchus leaps down from his chariot to join the mortal woman with whom he has suddenly fallen in love, his rowdy mob continues with its orgy. The god’s followers include the fat Silenus, drunk beyond coherence, and a young satyr with glazed eyes who drags behind him, as if it were a toy, the severed head of a sacrificed calf. It had been Titian’s achievement to distil the violence and weirdness of the Bacchic cults to a single image. He had conjured up a Renaissance equivalent to the frenzy described in Catullus’ famous 64th poem – which was, almost certainly, one of his principal sources:

Bacchus was rushing up and down with his dancing band of satyrs … looking for you, Ariadne. Some of them were waving thyrsi with covered points, some were tossing about the limbs of a mangled steer, some were girding themselves with writhing serpents; some were bearing in solemn procession dark mysteries enclosed in caskets, mysteries which the profane desire in vain to hear. Others were beating tambourines with uplifted hands, or were raising sharp ringings from cymbals of rounded bronze …

All this is relegated to the background of Caravaggio’s self-portrait, which, in its dryness, restraint and small scale, is a world away from Titian’s seductively orgiastic mythology. But it is there by implication. The violence that impends, the rending of the flesh, the drunkenness, the cannibalism – these things lurk in the teasing expression on the painter’s face. Might he have actually painted the picture behind his master’s back? Could it have been an act of truancy from the demeaning drudgery of the pure still life painting to which he had been assigned in the Cesari workshop? It has a sorceror’s apprentice feel to it, with its hints of illicit goings on, after dark and away from prying eyes. By the light of the moon, the young painter dares to dress up as a god of misrule.

Boy with a Basket of Fruit is a fresher, brighter painting. But there is maybe more to this work too than at first meets the eye. The viewer is confronted by a blushing, smooth-skinned adolescent, with dark curly hair and an expression of amorous intensity on his face. On the admittedly slender evidence of a later self-portrait by Mario Minniti, it is