L'Enfance de Bacchus
Nicolas Poussin·1628
Historical Context
The Childhood of Bacchus from around 1628 shows Poussin painting the young wine god being raised by nymphs in a pastoral setting that reflects his immersion in classical mythology during his formative years in Rome. The infancy of Bacchus — hidden from Juno's wrath and raised by the nymphs of Nysa — was a subject rich in classical associations, connecting the vine god's origins to the natural fertility he would later embody and the divine protection that sheltered him. Working in Rome from 1624 onwards, Poussin was building his knowledge of classical mythology from direct study of ancient sources — Ovid, Homer, and the mythographic compendiums that Renaissance scholars had produced — and his early Bacchic subjects demonstrate this learning put to visual use. His warm early palette, still influenced by Venetian colorism, gives these pastoral mythologies a sensuous vitality that would become more restrained as his classical principles hardened. The location of this painting is uncertain, but it represents an important early stage in his development of the mythological landscape.
Technical Analysis
The pastoral composition groups mythological figures in a landscape setting. Poussin's warm palette and fluid handling create a scene of mythological idyll.
Look Closer
- ◆Infant putti tread grapes in a large vessel at the composition's center — the future wine an ironic echo of Christ's first miracle at Cana.
- ◆Nymphs nurse the infant Bacchus at the edges, multiple wet nurses serving the wine god as a group of devoted communal caretakers.
- ◆Poussin paints the landscape lushly, with more foliage color than his arid later works — the young wine god's world requires fertile abundance.
- ◆A goat bleats somewhere in the background, its presence appropriate to a woodland god who will later take the goat as one of his sacred animals.
