Young Sick Bacchus by Caravaggio was created in 1594. The painting is in Galleria Borghese Rome. The size of the work is 67 x 53 cm and is made as an oil on canvas.
It is challenging to combine the traditional designation of Bacchus with the fact that the young man wears a wreath of ivy: ivy was certainly a sacred plant for Bacchus, but his wreath usually consists of grape leaves or vine leaves interlaced with ivy. Indeed, it is possible that early attempts to catalog an image as “Satyr,” for example, in the Borghese inventory of 1790, were not so mistaken since a wreath of ivy was one of the attributes of these bacchic followers. (Read more in Galleria Borghese)
About the Artist: Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born in Milan. During the final four years of his life he moved between Naples, Malta, and Sicily until his death. His paintings have been characterized by art critics as combining a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting. Caravaggio employed close physical observation with a dramatic use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism… Read more
