Self-portrait as Bacchus (known as “Sick Bacchus”

Merisi Michelangelo called Caravaggio

(Milan 1571 - Porto Ercole 1610)

Like the Giovane con canestra di frutta [Young Man with a Basket of Fruit] (inv. 136), this canvas was also among the group of works confiscated in 1607 from Giuseppe Cesari – called the Cavalier d’Arpino - accused by Paul V’s tax authorities of the illegal possession of firearms. In order to gain his freedom, the painter was forced to give his collection of pictures to the Apostolic Chamber. The collection was given in turn by the Pope to his nephew Scipione Borghese shortly thereafter.

The painting is an extremely realistic portrayal of the figure of a young man with the typical attributes of Bacchus, the god of wine and inebriation. He is turned toward the viewer in an atypical three-quarter pose, holding in his hands a bunch of lush green grapes, which clearly contrast with his bluish unhealthy complexion.

Critics have identified in the subject a possible self-portrait of the artist, by tracing the painting back to a documented event in the painter’s life, namely his hospitalisation at the Ospedale della Consolazione in Rome for undefined circumstances. This interpretation provides the origin for the work’s title: Autoritratto in veste di Bacco (Self-portrait in the Guise of Bacchus)or more commonly, Bacchino malato (Sick Bacchus).

Object details

Commentary

This work was part of the collection of paintings belonging to Giuseppe Cesari, called Cavalier d’Arpino, that was sequestered in 1607 when he was accused by Paul V’s tax officials of the illegal possession of a few arquebuses. The painting, along with Boy with Basket of Fruit (inv. 136) and 105 other works, was taken from the artist’s workshop and given by the pope to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, thus becoming part of the powerful prelate’s already large collection.

The work, one of Caravaggio’s first paintings, was unquestionably made in Rome, as also suggested by various contemporaries, including Giulio Mancini, who noted in his Considerazioni sulla pittura that it was painted in the home of Monsignor Pandolfo Pucci, where the artist was staying when he arrived in the city. According to Maurizio Marini (2011, pp. 43–44), the first owner of the painting was Costantino Spada, a dealer whose name was deciphered by the scholar in an almost illegible annotation to the Marciana’s copy of Mancini’s volume, an interpretation that had already been advanced by Marco Gallo in 2001 (pp. 43–70, 55).

The painting was identified in 1948 by Aldo De Rinaldis as the one cited in 1642 in Giovanni Baglione’s Vite, where we read that Caravaggio: ‘[...] painted a few portraits of himself in the mirror. And the first was a Bacchus with a few bunches of different grapes, made with great care but a bit dry in manner’ (Baglione 1642, p. 136), a theory rejected by Roberto Longhi, who considered the Bacchus described by the biographer to be the one commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte (Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi), which was made in all probability with the aid of a mirror, as indicated by the goblet held in the sitter’s left hand.

Following this long debate over whether it is the one in Florence or the one in Rome, almost all scholars now agree that the Bacchus cited by Baglione is the one in Rome, reading a few details, such as the later dating of the Uffizi version (about 1597) and stylistic differences in the handling of the facial features, as tangible proof.

The painting, which was not included in Iacomo Manilli’s description of the villa in 1650, is reported for the first time in the 1693 Borghese inventory, where it is described as ‘a painting on canvas measuring three palms by Caravaggio with a Bacchus with a crown of laurel on his head and a bunch of grapes in his hand and a bunch of black grapes at his feet with two peaches no. 475 with gilt frame’, and then in 1790 as ‘A Satyr, Caravaggio’. Confused in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century inventories with the Satyr’s Head Crowned with Vines by Pietro Paolo Bonzi (inv. 160), the painting was mistakenly listed as a work by Ludovico Carracci in the Inventario Fidecommissario of 1833, considered by Matteo Marangoni, Ludwig Schudt and Walter Friedländer to be a good copy.

The attribution of the painting was firmly restored to Caravaggio by Longhi, who gave it the title by which it is known today, Sick Bacchus, and interpreted the subject as a self-portrait of the painter in the guise of Bacchus. According to the scholar, the colour of the skin and lips is a reference to a personal episode, specifically a period of convalescence for unclear reasons, although this colouring was read by Maurizio Marini as the consequence of a shoddy restoration.

Longhi’s interpretation of the painting as a self-portrait of the artist was followed over the years by other theories, including Kurt Bauch’s argument linking the painting to the portrayal of the five senses, in particular taste; Lynch’s theory that it is an allegory of melancholy; Herwarth Röttgen’s idea that it depicts the effects of Bacchus’s drunkenness and Maurizio Calvesi’s proposal that the Bacchus is a prefiguration of Christ, holding a bunch of grapes, a symbol of his Passion and an allusion to the Eucharist and divine love.

Amidst those who have argued that the painting is linked to the milieu of contemporary literary academies and those who have instead seen it as connected to the society world of the patrons or the painter’s presumed homosexuality, Kristina Hermann Fiore was the first to interpret it as an homage to artistic inspiration. This reading was then fleshed out and clarified by Philip Morel who, starting from a Self-Portrait by Giovan Paolo Lomazzo, a painter and theoretician who headed the Accademia di Val di Blenio, concentrated on one of the many facets of the painting’s Bacchic component. According to the scholar, Caravaggio, linking himself to the god who invented wine, reproduced the gesture of this ‘invention’ in the middle of the painting: Bacchus, tightening his arm, is about to gently squeeze the grapes with his fingers. Also according to Morel, the crown of ivy, a classic Dionysian attribute, evokes the inspiration and glory of the poet/painter who in this work, depicting himself holding a bunch of grapes, emphasises the masterful illusionism of his rendering, probably in reference to the episode in which Zeuxis succeeds in tricking a few birds into pecking at some grapes he had painted, while remaining indifferent to the figure he had portrayed (Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, XXXV, 66).

In this painting, Caravaggio cites a few artists of special importance to him, including Michelangelo Buonarroti and Simone Peterzano, the latter his first teacher in Milan. As observed by Ferdinando Bologna, the pose clearly references a few works by Peterzano, identified by the scholar in the Certosa di Garegnano, and in particular the Persian Sibyl depicted in one of the pendentives in the presbytery, a study for which is in the Fondo Peterzano at the Castello Sforzesco, Milan. According to Herrmann Fiore, the painter also borrowed the position of the body from an engraving of the Ecce Homo by Albrecht Dürer, transforming the crown of thorns into one of ivy and the tombstone into the table upon which Bacchus rests his arm.

As all scholars have noted, the painting bears traces of the Lombard naturalism that, together with the Veneto-Emilian tradition, had been instilled in the painter through Peterzano. This has led most scholars to date the painting to about 1593, in line with the dating proposed by Sir Denis Mahon, who, rejecting the date advanced by Longhi, 1589, instead argued for 1592-94.

The recent theory that the painter arrived in Rome in about 1595 would push the date forward even further (Zuccari 2017, p. 257), unless one supposes that the painting, so packed with references to Caravaggio’s training in Lombardy, was made in Milan and brought to Rome by the artist himself, a theory that would, however, seem to contradict the reports of his most reliable biographers. While this important debate still remains unresolved, all scholars agree that the Sick Bacchus is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, painting by Caravaggio known at this time.

 Antonio Iommelli