1604
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Bacchanal is a 1604 by Pietro da Cortona, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a wild party in an Italian garden: gods, half-goat satyrs, and dancing women swirl around a wine barrel. This sketch was probably a practice run for a bigger wall painting meant to hang above a fancy dinner table. The rich would laugh at the drunken chaos while they ate—kind of like a 17th-century meme. If you like this kind of crowded, lively scene, look up *chiaroscuro*.
Here, a bacchanalia is in full swing with its required cast of characters: Bacchus, Roman god of wine, at right; Silenus, atop the wine barrel, always ready for another glass; and numerous bacchants consisting of maenads, satyrs, musicians, children, and a goat, all within an Italian landscape. This drawing may have been a design for a fresco or painting. Depictions of bacchanalia were often meant for dining spaces, where the elite of society could playfully mirror the revelries portrayed in their own enjoyment of food and wine.
Goats were commonly associated with sinful behavior, making them a common element in Bacchic scenes.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Pietro da Cortona (Italian: ; 1 November 1596 or 1597 – 16 May 1669) was an Italian Baroque painter and architect.
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