Titian
Renaissance scholars sought out descriptions of the lost paintings of antiquity in classical texts. Titian's Bacchanal was inspired by the Imagines of Philostratus (born c. 190), who describes a perhaps fictional visit to an art gallery in a villa outside Naples. There he reputedly saw a painting depicting drunken satyrs and maenads dancing on the island of Andros, where a river of wine runs perpetually. The brevity of Philostratus' text challenged Titian to invent his dramatic composition, which he partly based on other antique sources. The nude nymph at lower right, for example, recalls an ancient marble sculpture in the Vatican, the Sleeping Ariadne, which was thought to represent Cleopatra at the time it was unearthed in Rome in 1512. |
