Bacco bambino

Giovanni Bellini painted this small panel late in a very long career, in the years when he was the grand old man of Venetian painting and younger artists like Giorgione and the young Titian were coming up around him. It shows the god of wine as a plump baby, standing on a ledge and holding out a cup, with a quiet landscape opening behind him. For a long time people thought it was by Giorgione, and in a Venetian collection of the 1640s it was listed under his name. The idea of painting a solemn little child as an ancient god was the kind of thing Venice loved then, half classical learning and half nursery. The cup he lifts is the one clear sign of who he is meant to be.