Bacchant

Bacchant by Cima, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, represents one of the painter's rare excursions into mythological subject matter. The wine-god's follower, wreathed in vine leaves, demonstrates that Cima could bring his luminous naturalism to classical subjects as effectively as to sacred ones. This work falls in the decades immediately around 1500, when Renaissance ideals of harmony and classical order were being synthesised across Europe. Cima da Conegliano, active in Venice and his native Conegliano from the 1480s until around 1517, was the most accomplished Venetian follower of Giovanni Bellini in the generation before Giorgione and Titian transformed the tradition. His cool precise light, his characteristic Veneto landscape backgrounds, and his composed figure types gave his altarpieces and devotional panels a quality of contemplative clarity that served the devotional needs of the churches and private patrons throughout northeastern Italy who commissioned him. This work demonstrates the consistent quality that made him one of the most trusted religious painters in the Venetian world.

The figure is rendered with Cima's characteristically clear drawing and precise modeling. The vine leaves and grapes that wreath the bacchant are painted with the botanical specificity that Cima brought to all natural forms, each leaf and grape individually observed.