酒神狂欢

Rubens painted this around 1615, back home in Antwerp and at the height of his powers, running a workshop that turned out mythologies by the roomful. The subject is an old one, the riot of Bacchus, god of wine, and his followers, with the fat old teacher Silenus barely holding himself upright, goat-legged satyrs, and heavy-bodied nymphs. Rubens paints all that flesh as if it were ripe autumn fruit swollen with juice, warm and overflowing. There is no moral lesson here, just abundance pushed to the edge of too much. One odd fact of its later life is that he painted it on a wooden panel, but in 1892 a restorer in Russia lifted the paint layer off the wood and laid it onto canvas, which is how you see it now in Moscow.