This orgy in the countryside is a raw and racy take on a classical theme. It’s set in a mythical golden age, or at least bronze age, inspired by ancient Roman poetry, where goat-legged satyrs hang out with cupids and nymphs. Bacchus was the god of wine and his followers drunken reprobates. Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, perhaps the most famous depiction of bacchanalian behaviour, was painted as part of a series of mythic scenes for the Duke of Ferrara in the early 1500s (and today hangs in the National Gallery). This painting also from Ferrara, is in the fierce, intense style of local painter Dosso Dossi. But it playfully takes Titian’s classical revels into more pornographic territory, with dangerous liaisons everywhere you look.
A Bacchanal, follower of Dosso Dossi, 1525