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Caravaggio was in the company of friends and fellow painters. One of them started to tease him saying that his saints and gods weren’t very good because he needed to watch closer what the masters of the past had done and take their art as a model. Caravaggio smiled and made a large gesture towards the people on the street, saying: “Nature has already provided me with enough models.”

When, a year later, he set out to paint a Baccus, the Greek god of excesses, he used as a model a friend and lover, Mario Minniti, who was a meat market worker.

Baccus had been a favorite subject of many artists throughout the centuries. Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, along with many others, represented him as a young, beautiful, strong man, either alone, or while raising a glass of wine in the company of naked women in the midst of a bacchanalia, legendary feasts organized in his honor. (fig.4-7)

In all of these paintings, Baccus appears to be more than human: he is free and carefree, stunning, divinely proportionate. A god. In his short career, Caravaggio painted Baccus twice. The first time as a sick adolescent (fig. 8) and then as a young man in the prime of his life (fig. 9).

It would seem that the latter is closer to the image of Baccus that the masters had previously painted. Instead, more than the sick Baccus, the vibrant one is a mockery of those ideal representations.

At a first glance it seems that there is nothing “wrong” with this Baccus: he is just as young and strong, he is offering wine and wears a crown of vine leaves just like the others. But at a closer look, Caravaggio gave numerous hints showing what the painting really was: a colossal joke. In all of the previous portraits, Baccus wears a peplon, a Greek toga of sorts, and Caravaggio puts a cloth resembling a peplon on his model, something that only looks like it but that actually is simply a bedsheet thrown over the model and the bed. The sheet is not even really clean, it looks slept in and all creased. It seems that the painter and his lover staged the whole thing with the intention of making fun of the academic painters. Baccus’ smirk hides a laughter that the model can hardly contain, a laughter that the two friends must have been sharing for that whole time. (fig. 10)

Baccus here is not just a man who is drinking, he is actually drunk and his hazy eyes betray a state of intoxication. It is not a proper expression for a god and Caravaggio must have been very amused in not attempting to idealize his model’s expression.

Moving down Baccus’ body, there is another peculiar detail, this time an anatomical one (fig. 11).

There is a clear disproportion between a muscular arm– directly copied, so it seems, from some painting by Michelangelo – and a flat chest. The arm is the one of a grown man, the chest is the one of a young boy. The reason for this odd representation is twofold: on the one hand the quotation of a master of the recent past is juxtaposed to his anatomical excesses, and on the other hand, in an effort to be true to reality, Caravaggio makes the portrait of a regular man who, because of his job, has developed more muscles on his arms than on his chest.

Another detail that becomes apparent only at a second look is the use of everyday objects in the context of an abstract, classical portrait.

The pillow painted here (fig.12) is clearly part of the meager possessions of the artist himself, who lived in a rather poor small room. The stripes and the grain of the pillow are the ones of a sack used to carry potatoes and other alimentary goods. It must have been very amusing for the two friends to willingly uncover this detail, because it is apparent that the sheet is big enough to hide it.

But perhaps the most amusing joke is a straight reference of the young man’s hygiene habits. (fig.13-14)

These dirty nails are perfectly befitting the realistic representation of a poor like in Annibale Carracci’s “The Bean Eater”, not of that Greek god. Caravaggio made a habit to portray religious scenes in a manner that was deemed a little too much realistic. For example, in two paintings portraying scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary, he painted the believers surrounding with very dirty feet. (fig.15-16, Madonna dei Pellegrini).

(fig.17-18, Madonna del Rosario). These feet caused indignation in the Church orders that commissioned the paintings and the Madonna del Rosario ended up being removed from the church of the Pellegrini.

He also used to include details of everyday life, like a diaper in the Madonna del Rosario (fig. 19).

In these religious paintings his intent was far from blasphemous; he wanted to show that God is in everybody, rich and poor alike, and that a truthful representation of holy moments should include the more profound believers: the People.

In his Baccus, though, the use of realistic details were introduced with the explicit intent to upset the audience, to play with the more educated viewers. The messages that Caravaggio left for his audience to understand can be very subtle. The crown of leaves that Baccus in wearing is not made of the ones that traditionally he was painted in, they are simply wine leaves, an overbearing detail pointing to the god’s addiction to wine. Furthermore, the still life he included in the canvas does not express the vitality, lust and joyfulness that accompanies all the representations of Baccus. It is a still life where all the fruits are rotten, the leaves old and cracking (fig. 20).

This is an overt reference to one of the most relevant of Caravaggio’s work, the so called Fiscella Ambrosiana. It is the first still life in the modern history of art and it will the canon to which all painters will have to measure their work when they were painting a still life.

Such is the art of Caravaggio: dark and serious, bright protagonists against the blackness of life; and funny, ironic in his freedom to surpass the constraint of his time (fig. 21).