Ascolta l'arte e mettila da parte

June 15th, 2026

 EPISODE N.20

Today I would like to talk to you about one of the most fascinating, mysterious, and contradictory figures in ancient mythology: Bacchus. Or perhaps I should call him Dionysus, his Greek name. Because Bacchus is not simply the god of wine. If that were all he was, he probably would not have exerted such a powerful fascination on artists for more than two thousand years.

Bacchus is the god of intoxication, certainly. But he is also the god of transformation, instinct, freedom, theatre, and disguise. He is the god of everything that breaks conventions and escapes easy categories. Even the ancients struggled to define him. Male, yet possessing feminine features. Divine, yet born of a mortal mother. A civilizing force, yet also a bringer of madness. A figure capable of offering joy and, at the same time, destruction.

Perhaps this is precisely why artists have loved him for centuries. Through Bacchus, they could speak about something that concerns all of us: that part of our personality that refuses to be confined within rigid rules. That part which society constantly tries to control.

And to tell this story today, we will focus on three images: a Greek mosaic, a sculpture by Michelangelo, and finally one of the most enigmatic paintings in the entire history of art: Caravaggio’s Bacchus, now preserved in the Uffizi. A work that has continued to provoke debate among scholars for more than four centuries, because no one has ever fully explained exactly what we are looking at.

Let us start at the beginning. With a mosaic made of tiny sea pebbles in the fourth century BC in the ancient city of Pella, the capital of Alexander the Great’s Macedonia.

The image shows a naked young man riding an exotic animal. In his hand he holds a long staff topped with a pine cone, an ancient symbol of fertility. This is the thyrsus, his traditional attribute. That young man is Bacchus.

Already, this image tells us something important. Unlike Apollo, the god of order and restraint, Bacchus is a wandering god. His life is one long adventure. He is born from tragedy. His mother, Semele, is consumed by divine fire when Zeus reveals himself to her in his true form. The king of the gods manages to save the unborn child by sewing the fetus into his own thigh. Once brought to term, the infant Bacchus is raised far from Olympus to protect him from the wrath of Hera, Zeus’s wife.

But Hera finds ways to persecute him nonetheless. First, she drives mad the maternal relatives who had cared for him. Then she turns her fury against Bacchus himself. Struck by madness, he wanders the world for years, travelling through Egypt, Syria, Asia, and even India.

He is a foreign god. A god who comes from elsewhere. And perhaps this is why he is so often accompanied by panthers, leopards, and other exotic creatures.

Yet there is another aspect of Bacchus that is even more intriguing. Bacchus is the god of metamorphosis. There is no definitive image of him. He can appear as a child. He can appear as a young man. He may seem strong or delicate. Masculine or feminine. He is a fluid divinity, constantly changing, constantly transforming.

And this fluidity would become one of the key reasons for his extraordinary artistic fortune. Every artist would ultimately reinvent Bacchus in his own image.

—MUSIC—

Now let us leap forward almost two thousand years. The year is 1497. A Michelangelo barely in his twenties receives an extraordinary commission. Cardinal Raffaele Riario asks him to create a statue of Bacchus. Yet for reasons that remain unclear to this day, the cardinal later passes the sculpture on to his banker, Jacopo Galli, who displays it in his garden among a collection of ancient statues.

It is one of the most surprising works of Michelangelo’s entire career. It is also one of the very few sculptures with a secular subject that he ever produced. Yet what makes the work truly exceptional is Michelangelo’s interpretation of Bacchus himself.

If you visit the Bargello Museum in Florence, where the statue is preserved today, the figure standing before you is not a triumphant god. There is no heroic pose. No image of divine perfection. Instead, we see a drunken youth. Bacchus sways. He is almost losing his balance. His eyes are half closed. His gaze is distant and unfocused. He appears to be on the verge of falling.

It is a revolutionary image.

Ancient gods were normally represented as flawless beings. Michelangelo, by contrast, chooses to sculpt instability, vulnerability, and intoxication itself.

But there is something even more remarkable. Look closely at the body: the shoulders, the chest, the hips. It is not entirely male. Yet neither is it female. It is somehow both.

Giorgio Vasari would later write that Michelangelo sought to combine “the slenderness of a young man with the softness and fullness of a woman.” In other words, masculine agility and feminine sensuality coexist within the same body.

It is an extraordinary observation, because it captures the very essence of the character.

Bacchus is a divinity who destabilizes categories, and Michelangelo transforms that ambiguity into marble. He is not simply portraying the god of wine. He is creating a figure that exists in an intermediate space, between control and loss of control, between masculine and feminine, between balance and collapse. A figure that resists easy classification.

And if Michelangelo had already grasped this complexity, Caravaggio would carry it to its most radical conclusion.

—MUSIC—

Now imagine yourself entering the Uffizi. You stop before a relatively small canvas. Curiously, this is perhaps the only painting by Caravaggio that was never copied. Donated by Caravaggio’s patron and likely commissioner, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II de’ Medici, the painting was probably kept hidden within the private apartments of the Medici court. According to one intriguing theory, this was done at the request of Cosimo’s widow, Archduchess Maria Maddalena of Austria.

The devout archduchess may have found the subject somewhat embarrassing. Let us try to understand why.

A young man sits before us.He wears a white drapery around his body. A crown of vine leaves rests upon his head. In one hand he holds a glass of wine. His gaze meets ours. He seems to be inviting us to drink with him.

Our first impression is one of extraordinary naturalism. It hardly looks like a painting at all. It feels almost like a photograph. The only problem, of course, is that photography did not yet exist. And yet Caravaggio achieves something remarkably similar: the sensation of a fleeting moment captured from life, a fragment of reality suddenly frozen before our eyes.

Look closely at the wine. The carafe has only just been placed upon the table. The liquid still trembles as though the action had occurred a second earlier.

The young man we are looking at is not an idealized figure. He does not possess the flawless features of a classical deity. He is a real person. His hands and face are slightly flushed. His fingernails are dirty. His expression is languid, almost melancholy. And here the first mystery emerges.

Who exactly are we looking at? A god? Or a model disguised as a god? An actor playing a role?

Perhaps a young member of Cardinal Del Monte’s circle. Perhaps a friend of Caravaggio himself.

The artist offers us no answer. And perhaps that is precisely the point. The painting thrives on ambiguity. It is simultaneously a portrait, a genre scene, a still life, an allegory, and a mythological image. All of these things at once. And none of them on their own.

Now let us look more carefully at the young man’s gesture. He extends the glass toward us. At first, it appears to be a friendly invitation, perhaps even a seductive one. But is it really?

Because the moment our eyes move downward to the fruit, our perception changes completely.

Between us and the young Bacchus, Caravaggio has placed an inviting basket overflowing with fruit: a magnificent still life composed of apples, pears, grapes, figs, a peach, and even a pomegranate beside a chestnut. We are tempted to reach out and taste it. At least until we begin to examine it more closely. Then we notice that one of the apples has been eaten by worms. The peach in the foreground is nearly rotten. The quince bears visible bruises.

Even some of the leaves decorating the basket have begun to dry out. Those in the lower right corner are almost black, as black as the ribbon the young man holds in his right hand.

Suddenly the painting changes its meaning. It is no longer merely a celebration of pleasure. It becomes a meditation on time. On the fragility of beauty. On youth destined to fade. On pleasure destined to end. It is as though Caravaggio were saying: Yes, drink. Enjoy the wine. Enjoy youth. Enjoy life. But never forget that all of these things pass away. Far more quickly than you imagine.

Bacchus’s invitation thus becomes a reflection on the fleeting nature of human existence, a warning not unlike those still found on ancient Roman funerary monuments. Even the black ribbon, so unusual within such a festive context, can be interpreted as an allusion to death and mourning.

Yet there is one final element that makes this painting feel so astonishingly modern. Its sensuality. This Bacchus is extraordinarily ambiguous. His lips are soft. His skin luminous. His features delicate. He does not embody a traditional ideal of masculinity, yet neither is he feminine. He is something that escapes definition. Over the years, scholars have devoted enormous attention to this aspect of the painting, often associating it with a strongly homoerotic dimension. Indeed, it is difficult to deny that the young man presents himself to the viewer with a languid and seductive self-awareness. Yet reducing the entire meaning of the painting to an erotic interpretation would be limiting. I believe the answer lies elsewhere. Or rather, much deeper: in the myth itself.

Bacchus has always been a god closely associated with women. He was raised among women: first by his maternal relatives and later by the nymphs of Nysa. His most famous followers were the Maenads, the ecstatic female devotees whose frenzied rituals became one of the defining features of Bacchic worship. Ancient representations of the god often emphasize a beauty that is delicate, youthful, and almost androgynous.

Caravaggio did not invent this ambiguity. He simply pushed it to its furthest possible conclusion.

And in doing so, he created something remarkably modern. A figure that refuses to be confined within rigid categories. A god who embodies the complexity of human identity, its fluidity, its mutability, and its freedom.

And perhaps this is where the true secret of the masterpiece lies. Not in its technical perfection.

Not in its extraordinary still life. Not in its breathtaking realism. But in the fact that it continues to elude us. Every time we think we have understood the painting, it changes its face.

It is a moral allegory, yet it is also an invitation to pleasure. It is a portrait, yet it is also a god.

It is an everyday scene, yet it is also a philosophical meditation. It is an image of desire, yet also an image of death.

Just like its protagonist, it is never only one thing.

Bacchus is the god of transformation, of intoxication, of freedom. He is the embodiment of the most open, unpredictable, and untamed part of ourselves. The part that refuses to be reduced to a label. The part that never stops changing.

And perhaps this is precisely why, more than four hundred years later, the young man in the Uffizi still looks out at us with that enigmatic half-smile. And he continues to ask us the very same question.

Are you really sure you know who I am?

Or, more simply… Are you really sure you know who you are?

READ THE ARTICLE IN ITALIAN

Artworks: Bacco a cavallo di un ghepardo, IV secolo a.C., mosaico, Museo Archeologico, Pella; Michelangelo, Bacco, 1497, marmo, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Firenze; Caravaggio, Bacco, 1598 ca., olio su tela, Uffizi, Firenze.

Music: Charles Chaitman