扮作酒神巴库斯的自画像

This is Caravaggio painting himself in his first hard years in Rome, around 1593, not long after he arrived from Milan with almost nothing. He had fallen badly ill, spending months in the hospital of Santa Maria della Consolazione, and the young Bacchus he shows us is plainly unwell. The skin has a greenish, jaundiced cast, the lips are bluish, the eyes look tired, and he is said to have worked it out in front of a mirror, since he had no money for models. So the god of wine and pleasure is handed to us pale and sweating, holding out grapes he does not look able to enjoy. It is a strange, honest thing for a young painter to make, wine and sickness in the same face. The canvas ended up among the works of one of Caravaggio's early employers, and was seized in 1607 by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, which is how it came to hang in the Borghese gallery in Rome, where it stays today.