The Nurture of Bacchus

Painters usually showed Bacchus, the god of wine, as a drunken grown man. Here, around 1628, Poussin makes him a small child, and he is already drinking. A satyr squeezes grapes into a shallow bowl and the boy drinks from it. The story comes from the Roman poet Ovid. After his mother died, the baby god was secretly brought up by relatives, and the National Gallery reads the seated woman in blue as his aunt Ino, with her husband Athamas holding the child and their two young sons close by. Ovid also tells how it ended. The goddess Juno, jealous of the boy, drove Ino and Athamas mad. Poussin may be hinting at that with the dark clouds gathering behind the group and with the goat, an animal long linked with Bacchus, standing among the children.