The Triumph of Bacchus by Velazquez: Myth Meets the Tavern (c. 1628)
On the left, a pale, half-dressed Bacchus crowns a kneeling man with vine leaves. On the right, rough Spanish faces grin out at you with cups raised, as if the god had wandered into a Madrid tavern and decided to stay. In Diego Velázquez’s The Triumph of Bacchus, better known in Spain as Los Borrachos (The Drunkards), painted in 1628–1629 and now in the Museo del Prado, classical myth and street life share one canvas and refuse to apologise.
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Artist: Diego Velázquez (1599–1660)
Date: 1628–1629
Medium: Oil on canvas, 165 × 225 cm
Collection: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (P001170)
Notable fact: Paid for by Philip IV with 100 ducats; painted just before Velázquez’s first trip to Italy
A young painter at court
Velázquez was born in Seville in 1599 and trained there with the painter Francisco Pacheco, whose daughter he married. In 1623, still in his early twenties, he moved to Madrid and was appointed painter to the young King Philip IV, a post that made him the most important artist in Spain for the rest of his life. His early work in Seville had been dominated by kitchen scenes and religious pictures painted with strong light and dark, in the manner of Caravaggio. The Triumph of Bacchus was his first great mythological painting, and it shows him taking that Sevillian realism into the world of the court.
The picture was painted at a decisive moment. In 1628 the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens arrived in Madrid on a diplomatic mission and stayed for several months, painting for the king and examining the royal collection. Velázquez spent time with him, and the following year, in 1629, he left for his first journey to Italy. The Bacchus, paid for by the king that same year, was the last great picture he finished before leaving.
Two Halves, Two Worlds
The painting splits cleanly. Bacchus and the figure behind him wear loose classical drapery and sit in brighter light; their skin reads cooler and more ideal. The drinkers on the right wear contemporary poor men's clothes, with darker flesh and harder features closer to Jose de Ribera's naturalism. One younger man kneels before the god with sword and tall boots - better dressed than his companions, still very much of this world. The title "Triumph" is almost ironic: there is no leopard chariot, no parade of satyrs like the grand Bacchanals of Titian that the Spanish kings collected.
Wine as Temporary Release
Velazquez presents Bacchus as the power that gifts wine and, for a while, lifts men out of their troubles. The drinkers invite you into the party; their worn faces and direct stares break the museum glass. Ideal mythology softens into something you could meet after work. Caravaggio's habit of mixing sacred costume with everyday bodies is in the DNA here, remade for a Spanish court painter who already knew how ordinary people look when they laugh.
Myth as Visible Life
The canvas has been called the peak of his 1620s work. It announces a program he would keep chasing: treat myth as visible life, not as polished allegory alone. Look once for the god. Look again for the men who make the triumph feel human.
A still life at the god’s feet
Look down. At Bacchus’s feet, Velázquez places a glass bottle and an earthenware jug, painted with the same care as the kitchen still lifes of his youth. They are the most ordinary objects in the picture and the most convincing. The light that falls on the god’s pale shoulder also catches the glaze of the jug and the dark wine in the bowl held up by the man in the hat. Myth and matter share one light, and the effect is to bring the god down to earth rather than lift the drinkers up to heaven.
Afterlife: Goya and Manet
The painting entered the Prado with the royal collection and became one of its most popular works. In 1778 the young Francisco Goya made an etching after it, one of a series of prints that spread Velázquez’s paintings beyond the palace walls. A copy of that print later belonged to Édouard Manet, who admired Velázquez above all other painters and who travelled to the Prado in 1865 to see his work in person. The faces of the drinkers, laughing at the viewer, look forward to the frankness that the nineteenth-century realists would make their own.
Where can you see it?
The Triumph of Bacchus hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, among the museum’s great collection of Velázquez. In the same building you can see his Las Meninas, Guido Reni’s Atalanta and Hippomenes and Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. For Velázquez’s only surviving female nude, read about the Rokeby Venus in London, or browse more Baroque paintings in Explore Art.
See Velázquez’s The Triumph of Bacchus framed on your wall: a museum-quality print, canvas or poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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Sources
Museo Nacional del Prado, “The Triumph of Bacchus, or The Drunkards” (P001170); Smarthistory, “Velázquez, Los Borrachos”; Wikipedia, “The Triumph of Bacchus”.
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