Bacchus (Michelangelo)

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Bacchus

Michelangelo, 1497

Marble, height 203 cm

Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello

Bacchus (1497) is a marble sculpture by the Italian High Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect and poet Michelangelo. The statue is somewhat over life-size and depicts Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, in an appropriately inebriated state. Along with the Pietà it is one of only two sculptures than can be attributed with any certainty to the artist's first period in Rome.

Bacchus is depicted with rolling eyes, his staggering body almost teetering off the rocky outcrop on which he stands. Sitting behind him is a faun, who eats the bunch of grapes slipping out of his left hand. The figure, with its swollen breast and abdomen, suggested to Giorgio Vasari "both the slenderness of a young man and the fleshiness and roundness of a woman", and its androgynous quality has often been noted (although the testicles are swollen as well). The inspiration for the work appears to be the description in Pliny the Elder's Natural History of a lost bronze sculpture by Praxiteles, depicting "Bacchus, Drunkenness and a satyr".

Michelangelo gave the sculpture a high centre of gravity which, along with the symbolic wreath of vines, gives the impression of drink having 'gone to his head'. Similarly precarious poses can be found in a number of later works by the artist, most notably the David and the figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Bacchus holds in his right hand a goblet of wine and in his left a tigerskin, an animal associated with the god "for its love of the grape" (according to Michelangelo's biographer Ascanio Condivi). Both the goblet and the penis were cut off at one point and only the goblet was restored; the mutilation may have been to give the sculpture the illusion of greater antiquity. Such a concession to 'classical' sensibilities did not, however, convince Percy Bysshe Shelley of the work's fidelity to "the spirit and meaning of Bacchus". He wrote that "It looks drunken, brutal, and narrow-minded, and has an expression of dissoluteness the most revolting."

The statue was commissioned for the garden of Cardinal Raffaele Riario who intended for it to compliment his collection of classical sculptures. It was rejected by Cardinal Riario and found its way to the collection of Japoco Galli, banker to both the cardinal and Michelangelo, who had a similar garden. The statue was transferred to Florence in 1572.

[edit] References

• Bull, Malcolm (2005). The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art. London: Penguin
• Hall, James (2005). Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body. London: Chatto & Windus
• Pope-Hennessy, John (1996). Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture. London: Phaidon
• Symonds, John Addington. The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti. Project Gutenberg