The Feast of the Gods

Jan van Bijlert spent the early 1620s in Rome, where the recently dead Caravaggio was still the shock of the age and painters lit their figures like actors caught in a single lamp. Back home in Utrecht he carried some of that with him. Here the gods feast at the wedding of the sea nymph Thetis and the mortal Peleus, whose son would be the warrior Achilles. Bacchus, the god of wine, sprawls in the foreground holding a bunch of grapes over his open mouth, while a satyr dances on the table. The close-up bodies and ochre flesh still echo Rome, though by the 1630s Bijlert was cooling toward a calmer, classical manner. The left side of the canvas has been lost, so the party is missing part of its company.