Bacchus

A languid young Bacchus, vine leaves in his hair, reclines on a couch and offers a shallow glass of red wine, his fingers loosely pinching the stem, a bowl of fruit beside him beginning to bruise and turn. Caravaggio dresses a real Roman youth - heavy-lidded, slightly flushed - in the costume of the wine god, half invitation, half hangover. The decaying fruit and the cool, deliberate sensuality undercut any easy mythology. Painted for Cardinal del Monte and now in the Uffizi, it is the most knowing of his early role-playing pictures.