Los borrachos (The Triumph of Bacchus)

Los Borrachos (The Triumph of Bacchus), painted around 1628-1629 and now in the Prado, was Velázquez's first major mythological painting — a subject that demonstrated his aspiration beyond genre painting and portraiture toward the elevated genres of history and mythology. He imagines Bacchus as a real young man visiting a group of contemporary Spanish peasants, the god of wine crowning a supplicant while real drunken men laugh and toast around them. The humor and humanity of the scene — mythology democratized to the level of tavern life — is characteristic of Velázquez's approach to elevated subjects: gods made human, mythology made observable. The painting was made shortly before his first Italian journey and shows him already transforming the lessons of Caravaggio's naturalism.

As a later copy, the handling lacks the spontaneous energy of the Prado original but preserves the composition's essential structure. Comparing the copy to the original reveals what later painters found most striking about Velazquez's design — the contrast between the idealized Bacchus and the rough peasant faces.