Caravaggio - Bacchus 1596

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Caravaggio - Bacchus 1596

Bacchus 1596
95x85cm oil/canvas
Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy
The image is only being used for informational and educational purposes

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From Uffizi Gallery, Florence:
Nervous by temperament, often violent, revolutionary in his way of painting, Caravaggio personifies in every aspect of his eventful life the romantic figure of the damned artist.
Born in Milan, he worked mainly in Rome, Naples, Malta and Sicily. His training was strongly influenced by Venetian and Lombard painting: from the first, he learned the use of the color, from the second, he learned the deep realism and the preference for humble and popular subjects.
This last feature is observable in the famous Bacchus conserved at the Uffizi, commissioned by his patron Cardinal del Monte as a gift for the Grand Duke of Tuscany Ferdinand I and painted between 1596 and 1597.
In this masterpiece, Bacchus is not represented in an idealized way. On the contrary, he might look like a man of the people, like one of those characters Caravaggio used to hang around with in taverns and brothels. As in the majority of his paintings, the landscape is missing: the artist wants to focus on the humanity of the character rather than superfluous details. His choice of representing popular, uncouth and clumsy subjects brought him much criticism during his life.