Bacchus

Caravaggio painted this Bacchus in Rome in the mid 1590s, when he was barely into his twenties and working in the household of Cardinal del Monte. The god of wine offers you a shallow glass, but look at what surrounds him. The fruit in the bowl is already going over, spotted and split, a worm hole here, a bruise there, and the leaves are drying at the edges. That is deliberate. It is the old reminder that youth and pleasure rot as surely as everything else. There is one more thing the naked eye can barely catch. In the glass carafe on the table, imaging has revealed a tiny reflected figure of a man at an easel, holding a brush, most likely Caravaggio himself painting the scene.