Young Sick Bacchus

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Young Sick Bacchus: Caravaggio

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Caravaggio Oil Painting - Young Sick Bacchus

Keywords: Young, Sick, Bacchus

Work Overview: Young Sick Bacchus
Artist Caravaggio
Year c. 1593
Medium oil on canvas
Dimensions 67 cm × 53 cm (26 in × 21 in)
Location Galleria Borghese, Rome

The Young Sick Bacchus (Italian: Bacchino Malato), also known as the Sick Bacchus or the Self-Portrait as Bacchus, is an early self-portrait by the Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, dated between 1593 and 1594. It now hangs in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. According to Caravaggio's first biographer, Giovanni Baglione, it was a cabinet piece painted by the artist using a mirror.

The painting dates from Caravaggio's first years in Rome following his arrival from his native Milan in mid-1592. Sources for this period are inconclusive and probably inaccurate, but they agree that at one point the artist fell extremely ill and spent six months in the hospital of Santa Maria della Consolazione.[citation needed] According to a 2009 article in the American medical publication Clinical Infectious Diseases, the painting indicates that Caravaggio's physical ailment likely involved malaria, as the jaundiced appearance of the skin and the icterus in the eyes are indications of some active hepatic disease causing high levels of bilirubin.[2]

The Sick Bacchus was among the many works making up the collection of Giuseppe Cesari, one of Caravaggio's early employers, which was seized by the art-collector Cardinal-Nephew Scipione Borghese in 1607, together with the Boy Peeling Fruit and Boy with a Basket of Fruit.

Apart from its assumed autobiographical content, this early painting was likely used by Caravaggio to market himself, demonstrating his virtuosity in painting genres such as still-life and portraits and hinting at the ability to paint the classical figures of antiquity. The three-quarters angle of the face was among those preferred for late renaissance portraiture, but what is striking is the grimace and tilt of the head, and the very real sense of the suffering; a feature that most Baroque art shares.

The still-life can be compared with that contained in slightly later works such as the Boy With a Basket of Fruit and the Boy Bitten by a Lizard where the fruits are in a much better condition, reflecting no doubt Caravaggio's improved condition, both physically and mentally.

The painting shows the influence of his teacher, the Bergamasque Simone Peterzano, in the utilization of the tensed musculature depiction, and of the austere Lombard school style in its attention to realistic details.

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Michelangelo Merisi (1571-1610) was born near Bergamo in the town of Caravaggio, whose name he added to his own, and spent his early years there. In 1592, shortly after moving to Rome, he fell ill and spent six months in the hospital of Santa Maria della Consolazione, which had been founded in 1506. Over the next two years he painted the Self-portrait as Sick Bacchus, also known as Bacchino malato (Figure 1). The external sign of Bacchus's (i.e. Caravaggio's) problem is jaundice, as can be seen from the flesh tints, which match those of the peaches on the table in front of him, the slight tinge of yellow in the sclerae, and a comparison of this Bacchus with one that Caravaggio painted in 1596 (Figure 2), an altogether healthier specimen.

The God whom we know as Bacchus was originally called Dionysus, identified in Hesiod's Theogony as the son of Zeus and Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, King of Thebes, and his wife Harmonia. In one version of the story, Zeus's wife, Hera, angered at yet another of her husband's acts of infidelity, visited Semele while she was pregnant and persuaded her to ask Zeus to appear to her in his divine glory. He did so, and she was burned to death by his luminosity. But Zeus rescued the unborn child and kept him in his thigh until he could be born on Mount Nysa, after which he was named.

Dionysus is mentioned only twice in passing in the Iliad and twice in the Odyssey, and there are few other literary references to him before the 5th century BC, although in 6th century vases he is repeatedly depicted as the god of wine. He was first called Bacchus by 5th century Greek playwrights, including Sophocles in Oedipus Rex.

If Caravaggio was jaundiced during his illness, why did he choose to portray himself thus as Bacchus? This is no simple hangover. Bacchus was, of course, ‘affable and hospitable at every hour’, to use the phrase that Hugh Massingberd, one-time obituaries editor at the Telegraph, included among his armament of euphemisms; in other words, a chronic alcoholic. And presumably Caravaggio had seen chronic alcoholics, jaundiced and dying of liver failure due to cirrhosis.

But Caravaggio's Bacchus is a portrait of himself while suffering from an acute illness, from which he eventually recovered. In late 16th century Rome, jaundice of unknown origin was most likely to have been due to acute infective hepatitis, perhaps caused by a zoonosis, such as brucellosis or Q fever.1 However, in playing this game one should not disregard any kind of clue, even the most tenuous. We therefore note with amusement a study in which antibodies to hepatitis C virus were measured in 51 patients with essential mixed cryoglobulinaemia associated with glomerulonephritis, and in 45 controls with non-cryoglobulinaemic glomerulopathies.2 In the patients with essential mixed cryoglobulinaemia, an ELISA assay detected antibodies to hepatitis C virus in 98% of serum samples, whereas the rate was only 2% in the controls. And why is this study relevant? Because it was carried out in the wards and clinics of the Ospedali Riuniti di Bergamo and the Ospedale di Treviglio e Caravaggio.

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Among Caravaggio's early works, this painting belongs to the small group which has always been seen as self-portraits. The livid colors of the subject's face, his teasing smile and the mock seriousness of his mythological dignity all reinforce the attempt to undermine the lofty pretensions of Renaissance artistic traditions..

Caravaggio here makes no attempt to paint the god Bacchus, but just a sickly young man who may be suffering from the after-effects of a hangover &emdash;appropriate for the god of wine. There is no mistaking the artist's delight in the depiction of the fine peaches and black grapes on the slab, the white grapes in his hand and the vine leaves that crown his hair, but the artist is not content merely to demonstrate his superb technique: he wishes to play an intimate role and only the slab separates him from the viewer.

His appearance is striking rather than handsome: he shows both that his face is unhealthy and that his right shoulder is not that of a bronzed Adonis, as convention required, but pale as in the case of any man who normally wears clothes.

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