Bacchus

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 a revolutionary inebriated state. Along with the Pietà it is one of only two sculptures that 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 ... more

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 a revolutionary inebriated state. Along with the Pietà it is one of only two sculptures that 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,... less