Bacco

Rubens kept this one. When he died in 1640, at the height of his fame and wealth, Bacchus was still in his studio, unsold, and it passed to a nephew. By then Rubens was in his sixties, slowed by gout, and the god of wine he painted is no slim youth. He is a vast, sagging drinker perched on a barrel with one foot on a tiger, a satyr and a fat child beside him, wine already running. Rubens seems to have modelled the heavy head on an ancient Roman bust of the emperor Vitellius, a byword for gluttony. The panel was later carried to Russia, and at some point in the 19th century its paint was lifted from the wood and transferred onto canvas.