Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Los Borrachos (The Drunks), also known as The Triumph of Bacchus, 1628-1629, 165 x 225 cm (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in the Prado in Madrid, and we’re looking at a great early Velázquez, “The Triumph of Bacchus.” The painting is unnervingly vivid, almost more than photographic.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:18] Bacchus, the god of wine, looks beautiful, and he’s sort of bathed in light.
Dr. Zucker: [0:22] That young central figure.
Dr. Harris: [0:24] And he’s sitting on a jug of wine.
[0:26] [laughs]
Dr. Zucker: [0:27] Yes, appropriately.
Dr. Harris: [0:28] He’s the god of wine.
Dr. Zucker: [0:29] He’s got grape leaves in his hair.
Dr. Harris: [0:31] He’s come down to earth to bring men wine, which relieves life’s sufferings, and relieving it, it is!
[0:40] [laughter]
Dr. Harris: [0:40] You know, everyone’s having a really good time. There’s a figure kneeling down, one of Bacchus’ followers. He’s having a crown placed on his head. There’s a feeling of revelry and partying and fun. Bacchus looks away.
Dr. Zucker: [0:54] Yes.
Dr. Harris: [0:55] But that other figure just to the right…
Dr. Zucker: [0:57] With the hat.
Dr. Harris: [0:58] He feels like someone we’ve all seen in a bar somewhere.
Dr. Zucker: [1:02] Exactly right. He’s got this bowl of wine that he’s about to bring to his lips. Which, I don’t know about for you, but to me, I feel as if I can just feel the coolness of that liquid. It is so transparent. I can feel it waft or push…
Dr. Harris: [1:17] The glistening surface.
Dr. Zucker: [1:18] The glistening surface. I can feel it sort of edge side to side.
Dr. Harris: [1:21] Right.
Dr. Zucker: [1:22] And I can see his anticipation. But he’s looked up at us. And so it’s not just the vividness of the contrast of light and shadow across his face. It’s the way in which he smiles directly at us so that we are there. We are right there ready to partake.
Dr. Harris: [1:37] I think that’s what’s so uncomfortable about it. He’s a kind of seedy character.
Dr. Zucker: [1:42] Yes he is.
Dr. Harris: [1:43] He looks like he’s lived a hard life and the figures around him, too, [have] a leathery skin and clothing that looks very poor.
Dr. Zucker: [1:51] Especially in contrast to the god.
Dr. Harris: [1:54] When he looks out at us, it implies that we’re like him. I become a rowdy reveler in a half-drunken state, partying it up and not feeling life’s pain anymore.
Dr. Zucker: [2:09] There is guilt by association. I think that that’s exactly right. We are drawn in. It’s interesting that we’re drawn in, not only because of the scale of the figures and the sense of proximity. Right? We’re drawn in by a kind of almost moral equivalency.
Dr. Harris: [2:23] There is a lovely frieze of the figures. They’re all very much close to the foreground in a very Baroque way and occupy all the same plane across that foreground, taking up much of the space of the painting. There’s a real directness about the figures. They’re very much in our space.
Dr. Zucker: [2:43] There’s also a really interesting set of contrasts. You have the…as you described, the very beautiful body and sort of young and perfect body of Bacchus. You’ve then got the satyr just over his shoulder, and those two mythological figures — and perhaps the third crouching down in the foreground in the shadow — are so contrasted against the figures of our reality who are on the right.
[3:06] One of the things that I think makes this painting feel so vivid and so engaging is the variation in degrees of focus that Velázquez brings to the canvas. In other words, look at the background. It couldn’t be more unfinished. The figure in the foreground in the lower left that we mentioned, in shadow, feels almost incomplete.
[3:27] That really draws our eye right into those center figures here. There is something very interesting about the contrast. Again, you mentioned it before between the directness of the man with the hat and the way in which Bacchus himself looks off to the side, so our eye has to go to the man that we don’t want to go to, in a sense.
Dr. Harris: [3:47] There’s a kind of realism that Velázquez is bringing to a mythological subject, and not — intentionally not representing it in a classical manner.
Dr. Zucker: [3:56] He gives us a few handles. Actually, quite literally if you look at the jugs down at the bottom in the center. There is a vividness there. We feel as if we can literally reach in and grab one of those, and it’ll be poured full of wine for us.
[4:09] But there are these points of entrance and these points of physical reality that give us access to the mythological in a way that I don’t think we were used to.
Dr. Harris: [4:19] It’s very much like the way that Caravaggio would paint religious subjects in Italy, with that immediacy and realism and physicality and the down-to-earthness of the figures and the way that everything is happening very close to us. I think what we’re seeing is a Caravaggio-inspired approach applied to mythological subject.
[4:39] [music]
