Bacchus Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)

Description of Peter Rubens’ painting Bacchus

Rubens is a Flemish painter, a master of the Baroque - his paintings represent almost the essence of that style. He is cheerful, vivid, with much detail; they honor life and glorify it, representing almost a slap in the face of death. He preferred religious and mythological subjects, especially revealing the myths of ancient Greece.

Bacchus - aka Dionysus, aka Bacchus - the god of winemaking, inspiration, vegetation, and the life force that nourishes everything. Where he passes, unbridled pretty girls go with him, wine pours, universal feasts and festivities reign, where there is room for everyone who wants to have fun.

Rubens depicts him as a fat man, sitting on a barrel of wine and raising a bowl into which the same wine is poured. His Bacchus is obese and, judging by his face - flabby, almost brooding - close to getting tired of the perpetual turmoil going on around him. He wears a wreath of clusters of grapes on his head.

Around him, people are drinking - a man, also naked, pours wine directly from a jug into his mouth, a woman has bared one breast and is serving her lord, children around - one drinks wine pouring from the cup of Bacchus, the other is urinating, apparently, getting rid of the drunken wine. The big cat beneath the god’s foot lies on its side, looking content and obediently letting itself be rolled.

The whole composition pulls toward Bacchus as the center. He, who allows us to get rid of all moral and other inhibitions, to open up to the world and become for a time drunk, mad and happy, gives meaning to our own bacchanalia. Without it, it would be an ugly feast of madmen. With him, there is a kind of higher meaning in it, a liberation and a boundless joy of savagery.

Some people will be disgusted by the painting, others will be tempted to join Bacchus’ retinue, in which one can look anything: fat, drunk. Insane.