Triumph of Bacchus

A woman was not supposed to paint this. Around 1655 Michaelina Wautier, working in Brussels, filled a canvas nine feet high with the drunken parade of the god Bacchus, crowded with life-size naked men. No earlier woman is known to have painted a full-scale male nude, the human figure being a study women were barred from, and Wautier did a whole riot of them. On the right, one figure meets your eye, calm amid the sprawl, a vine wand in her hand and one shoulder bare. That is Wautier herself, looking back out of a scene she was not meant to be able to make. For centuries the picture was credited to men, among them her better-known brother Charles. Only in recent decades has her name been put back on it, and it now holds a wall at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.