Bacchus (Leonardo)
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The Leonardesque painting of Bacchus, formerly a Saint John the Baptist, in the Musée du Louvre is based on a drawing by the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci but executed by an unknown follower, perhaps in Leonardo's workshop. The drawing Sidney J. Freedberg assigns to Leonardo's second Milan period.[1] Some have claimed that the painting could have been done by any of several Lombard painters, Cesare da Sesto,[2] Marco d'Oggiono, Francesco Melzi, "none of them successfully" Freedberg remarked[3] or by Cesare Bernazzano. The painting began its career as a Saint John the Baptist who is pointing with his right hand off to the right, and with his left hand grasps his thyrsus. Then in the late seventeenth century[4] it was overpainted and altered, to serve as a Bacchus.
Cassiano dal Pozzo remarked of the painting in its former state, which he saw at Fontainebleau in 1625, that it had neither devotion, decorum nor similitude,[5] the suavely beautiful, youthful and slightly androgynous Giovannino was so at variance with artistic conventions in portraying the Baptist— neither the older ascetic prophet nor the Florentine baby Giovannino, but a type of Leonardo's invention, of a disconcerting, somewhat ambiguous sensuality, familiar in Leonardo's half-length Saint John the Baptist, also in the Louvre.[6]
The overpainting transformed the image of St. John into one of a lusty pagan, by converting the long-handled cross-like staff to a Bacchic thyrsus and adding an ivy wreath. The fur and wreath in the painting are the legacy of John the Baptist, while the fruit and laurel wreath relate the figure to Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and intoxication.
Notes
- ^ S.J. Freedberg, "A Recovered Work of Andrea del Sarto with Some Notes on a Leonardesque Connection" The Burlington Magazine 124 No. 950 (May 1982:266, 281-288) p 285; the badly smudged and damaged red chalk drawing, conserved in the Museo del Santuario del Sacro Monte, Varese, is illustrated p.284, fig. 27.
- ^ Cesare is mopst often credited with the best of three copies of this work in its original formulation, on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland.
- ^ Freedberg 1982:285
- ^ After 1683, when it was inventoried at Saint Jean dans le désert at Fontainebleau, but before 1693, when it was inventoried at Meudon as a Bacchus, with a marginal note that it had formerly been previously inventoried as a Saint John. (Freedberg 1982:285, note 16.
- ^ Noted by A. Ottino della Chiesa, Leonardo Pittore (Milan) 1967:109, from a document in the Vatican Library.
- ^ See Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, "Giovannino Battista: A Study in Renaissance Religious Symbolism" The Art Bulletin 37.2. (June 1955:85-101).
References
- Musée du Louvre, Hommage à Léonard de Vinci 1952:34ff.
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