7. Young Sick Bacchus
Young Sick Bacchus is Caravaggio’s earliest known painting, dating from his time in Cesari’s workshop. It depicts Bacchus, the Roman god of farming, wine, and fertility, a common subject of Renaissance art. However, Caravaggio’s rendering is characteristically atypical amongst such portrayals. Where most renderings of Bacchus display him as a young, vivacious god flush with wine and merrymaking, Caravaggio’s Bacchus is clearly unwell. He is jaundiced, with dry lips, and a somewhat tragic look of intoxication rather than a jovial one. The fruit is ripe, but placed on a strikingly bare surface, and the grapes are clutched possessively.
This Bacchus is not inviting the beholder to join his revelry, and even seems to shy from company, as Andrew Graham-Dixon notes regarding the position of his right leg. But would we want to join him? His dry, pale lips are not smiling, but suggest world-weariness. The tenebrism indicates that the picture is set at night, the time for revelry. But this Bacchus does not seem an especially happy or sociable figure. Instead, his legs and the vine leaves slip away into nothing, and he is very much alone. Perhaps this feature suggests the ephemerality of both inebriation and joy.
Intriguingly, the Young Sick Bacchus is widely believed to be a self-portrait of Caravaggio. As Graham-Dixon observes, whilst Bacchus is associated with joy, and also artistic inspiration, he simultaneously symbolises anarchy and surrender to the senses. He is passion, rather than reason, and in Euripides’s tragedy, The Bacchae, he destroys Thebes by luring its citizens with wine and revelry to the mountains and sending them mad. The picture, as an allegory, thus represents the carnal, impassioned side to Caravaggio’s complex character: the heavy-drinking, promiscuous, fiery-tempered brawler of the artists’ district, with the latent capacity for chaos and total self-destruction.