Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [91]
BACCHUS AND HEAD OF THE MEDUSA
None of the artist’s pictures are more teasingly poised between the sacred and the profane than the Bacchus that he painted sometime in 1597 or 1598 for his patron Cardinal del Monte. This later Bacchus is very different from the Self-Portrait as Bacchus – the malingering reveller, impersonated by the artist himself, painted during his apprentice days of discontent. The model, this time, seems to have been Caravaggio’s Sicilian friend Mario Minniti. He is a swarthy, ruddy-cheeked, well-fed god of wine, crowned with a wreath of grapes and vine leaves. An air of Dionysian mystery still clings to him, but he is very much the Greek god in his Roman incarnation. Wearing a toga, he lounges on a triclinium, as the ancient Romans did when feasting.
There is a decanter on the table in front of him, two thirds full of a wine so darkly crimson that it looks almost black. There are bubbles at its surface and its level is askew, a minute touch of realism that makes the moment captured in the painting seem ever more fleeting. The wine is still swinging in the heavy bowl of the decanter. The boy-god has just set it down, after pouring a glassful of the liquid into the fine-stemmed Venetian goblet that he holds, delicately, in his left hand. He offers the wine to the viewer of the painting. His expression is gently quizzical, his half-raised eyebrow both invitation and challenge: unriddle me if you can.
The Bacchus is a sophisticated, courtly work of art, calculated to catch the eye and then hold it. It is an enigma embodied as a rich store of captivating details. Viewed from a certain perspective, the picture seems ripe with sensuality, bordering on outright lubricity. The barely draped boy might be no more than an elaborately wrapped sexual gift. Does he himself not hint at that possibility, with the suggestive play of his right hand in the knot of black ribbon that binds his clothes?
That would be the profane approach to the picture. But there is space for a devout approach too. There is another way of undoing that knot. Bacchus is the god of wine and of autumnal fruitfulness, and in keeping with that Caravaggio has given him another of his overflowing baskets of fruit. The black grapes have never seemed so lustrous, the figs so ripe. But the foliage once more is withered, the apple worm-eaten, the quince and the plum bruised. The pomegranate has split and collapsed, disgorging its fleshy seeds. Once more, a sense of eucharistic implication hovers in the still air. Summer has become autumn and the sere leaves at the basket’s edge are the presage of death to come. But there is hope here too: the transcendent promise of eternal life is contained in the glass of wine held so carefully by the boy-god – and with such precise metaphorical intent – directly above the basket of decaying fruit.
According to the Neoplatonic thought of the Renaissance, classical myth was alive with shadowy anticipations of Christian truth. The legend of Dionysus, who died to be reborn, was regarded as a pagan prophecy of the coming of Christ. So it was that the figure of Dionysus/Bacchus became associated with the Saviour himself. Caravaggio’s Bacchus has sad, solemn eyes. Those aware of his Christian aspect might also have noted how the toga that drapes him so loosely also resembles a winding sheet. The wine that he offers is the wine of his blood, an allusion lightly pointed by the heart-shaped shadow, angled towards the figure’s heart, cast by the decanter. The apparent promise of physical delight has been transfigured, changed to a metaphysical gift.
The picture plays on the deceptive nature of appearances, yet also flaunts the very deceptions that brought it into being. As he had done in The Musicians, Caravaggio allows the viewer to peer behind the