Bacchanalia

This small canvas was made as decoration for a villa. It came from the Villa Pisani at Stra, the grand country house the Pisani family raised along the Brenta, the canal-lined river where wealthy Venetians passed their summers. The subject is a bacchanal, a festival of the followers of Bacchus, the wine god, though Zuccarelli treats it the way he treated most subjects, as an occasion for landscape. The revellers cluster under trees while the ground opens behind them into his familiar soft blue distance. After the Republic fell in 1797 the picture passed to the royal palace in the city, where it hung from 1807, and it reached the Accademia in 1923. At barely a metre wide, it was made to sit in the panelling of a room, close enough to read every small figure.