Bacchanal

Bacchus has found Ariadne on the island where Theseus left her, and he is helping her up into a chariot drawn by lions. Satyrs and maenads press round them, and old Silenus arrives on a donkey. Poussin painted this in Rome in 1625 and 1626, during his first years in the city. Titian's great bacchanals were in Rome in those years too, in a cardinal's collection, and young painters went there to study them. The Venetian warmth of this canvas comes out of that looking. Around a decade later those Titians were handed over to Philip IV of Spain, and two of them are in this museum today. The Poussin arrived by another road, bought by Philip V for his palace at La Granja and moved to the Prado in 1829.