Bacchus and a Drinker

Around 1608 a colossal ancient statue of Dionysus, the god the Romans called Bacchus, entered the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese in Rome, and it is still in the Galleria Borghese. The museum thinks Manfredi took his Bacchus's pose from that marble and then roughened it. The god here is young and solidly built, yet he seems to wear the features of a real model, and he is squeezing grapes straight into the crystal glass of an elegant young man, seen in profile and dressed in the fashion of the day. It may stand for autumn, or for an invitation to enjoy the passing pleasures of life. For a long time the canvas passed as a Caravaggio. It belonged to Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, secretary of state to Pope Benedict XIV, and in 1749 Giovanni Paolo Pannini gave it a place in his imagined view of the cardinal's picture gallery, a painting now in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. The German scholar Hermann Voss recognised Manfredi's hand in 1924. Technical study has since shown that the soft passages from light into shadow are built up from many layers of paint laid one over another.