Bacchus in art: the wine god from Pompeii to Caravaggio

Bacchus is the Roman name for Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. For two thousand years artists have used him to paint what wine feels like: joy, abandon, a little danger. That is why I love him. He is proof that wine was always about the feeling, never the score.

How to recognise Bacchus

• A crown of vine or ivy leaves, often with grapes.
• The thyrsus: a staff wrapped in ivy and topped with a pine cone.
• The kantharos: a deep wine cup with two tall handles.
• Big cats: a panther or leopard at his feet, or pulling his chariot.
• His crowd: satyrs (half goat), maenads or bacchantes (his wild female followers), and old Silenus, his tutor, usually drunk and often on a donkey.
• Ariadne, the princess he married after Theseus abandoned her on Naxos.

Greek artists first showed him as a bearded man, later as a soft, beardless youth. The Romans inherited both, and so did the painters of the Renaissance.

In Roman art

• Bacchus and Vesuvius. A wall painting from the household shrine of the House of the Centenary in Pompeii, now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. Bacchus is dressed as a giant bunch of grapes, with a panther at his feet, beside a mountain covered in vines, usually read as Vesuvius, the volcano that would bury the town.
• The Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii. A frieze of near-life-size figures on a deep red wall, still in place. Dionysus lies in Ariadne's lap at the centre. It is usually read as a woman's initiation into his mystery cult.
• The House of the Thiasus, Pompeii. A newer find: in February 2025 the Pompeii Archaeological Park announced a banquet hall painted with a procession of the god's followers, maenads and satyrs among them.
• The Badminton sarcophagus, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A marble coffin from around 260 to 270 AD, carved with Dionysus riding a panther among the four Seasons. It stood at Badminton House in England for over two centuries.
• The Lycurgus Cup, British Museum, London. A 4th-century Roman glass cup showing King Lycurgus trapped in a vine for attacking the god's followers. It looks green in normal light and glows red when lit from inside.

In the Renaissance

• Michelangelo, Bacchus (1496–97), Museo del Bargello, Florence. A marble god who sways as if the wine has just hit, with a little satyr nibbling grapes behind him. The cardinal who ordered it, Raffaele Riario, did not keep it; it ended up in the garden of the banker Jacopo Galli.
• Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–23), National Gallery, London. Painted for Duke Alfonso d'Este's private room in Ferrara. Bacchus leaps from a chariot pulled by cheetahs, in love at first sight with Ariadne. The stars above her are her crown, which he turns into a constellation.

In the Baroque

• Caravaggio, Young Sick Bacchus (about 1593–94), Galleria Borghese, Rome. A pale, greenish Bacchus. His early biographer said Caravaggio painted it from a mirror, so it is usually seen as a self-portrait.
• Caravaggio, Bacchus (about 1598), Uffizi, Florence. A languid young god offering you a glass of red wine, beside a basket of fruit. Painted for Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, it was rediscovered in the Uffizi's storerooms in 1913.
• Velázquez, The Triumph of Bacchus (1628–29), Prado, Madrid. Painted for King Philip IV and known in Spain as Los borrachos, “the drunks”: a luminous god crowning a group of very real, sunburnt drinkers.
• Rubens, Bacchus (1638–40), Hermitage, Saint Petersburg. No graceful youth here: a heavy, flushed Bacchus enthroned on a wine barrel.

Where to see them

Why artists keep coming back to him

Bacchus lets a painter show pleasure and its price in one figure. Titian's god is love at first sight; Rubens's is the morning after. For a wine lover these works are the best wine writing there is: not one tasting note, all feeling. Next time you are in Florence, see both Caravaggio and Michelangelo in a day, then go and drink a glass of Chianti Classico.

More on the god himself in Bacchus, the original winefluencer, and more ancient wine in Pliny the Elder, the first wine blogger and why wine started in clay pots.

Questions people ask