1481
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Bacchanal with Silenus is a 1481 by Andrea Mantegna, a Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a wild party: a bearded man in a crown slumps drunk, while half-goat satyrs and a woman in a leopard skin pull him up to dance. This painting is half of a bigger picture. The other half shows the god Bacchus, but here it’s his teacher Silenus, so drunk he can barely stand. The Romans wrote about Silenus—wise when sober, but usually too tipsy to share his knowledge. If you like this, look up *chiaroscuro*—the way Mantegna uses light and shadow to make the figures pop.
This print was probably conceived by Andrea Mantegna as the right side of Bacchanal with a Wine Vat , which shows Bacchus crowned. Here, the central figure is also crowned, but unlike the wine god, he appears saturated with drink. The scene may come from the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BCE). He described Bacchus’s teacher, Silenus, roused from a drunken sleep by two satyrs and a maenad and incited to sing so that his companions could dance. Silenus’s great wisdom was said to be generated by wine, but Renaissance artists more typically portrayed him as the embodiment of overindulgence.
Like most artists in Renaissance Italy, Mantegna was often inspired by ancient Greek and Roman art. In this print, the revelers are positioned in the foreground of a shallow picture plane, reminding savvy viewers of a Roman frieze.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Andrea Mantegna (UK: , US: ; Italian: ; c. 1431 – September 13, 1506) was an Italian Renaissance painter, a student of Roman archaeology, and the son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna…
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