Art Institute of Chicago

Bacchanal

Giulio Sanuto

Date

c. 1550

Medium

Engraving in black on two sheets of ivory laid paper, joined through the center

Culture

Italy

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Giulio Sanuto, an idiosyncratic Venetian engraver, reveled in displaying bacchic musical imagery on a large scale. The flutes, panpipes, cymbals, stomping feet, and twisting bodies seen here mark the rowdy procession as quickly degenerating into chaos. The portly and drunken figures with their pendulous quadruple breasts and other anatomical oddities echo the excesses of the paired Bacchanal friezes by Andrea Mantegna (1956.1010 and .1011), while the intertwined poses of the revelers also suggest Antonio Pollaiuolo’s Battle of the Naked Men (1938.260). The darkening tree cover marks their festivities as a truly ancient ceremony to which mortal viewers should not be privy.

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