Bacchus - Bloemaert

A print of Bloemaert's Bacchus — a Dutch Mannerist engraving of the Roman god of wine from the Utrecht circle around 1600, drawn in the long-limbed, torqued figure style that defined Dutch print design at the turn of the 17th century.

Bacchus — Dionysus in the Greek — is the god of wine, of ritual madness, of theatre and of the vine. In Dutch Mannerist print design he appears over and over, usually as a soft-bodied youth crowned with vine leaves and grapes, accompanied by satyrs, a panther, a wine cup or a thyrsus. The subject gave engravers everything they wanted — a naked figure, complex drapery, foliate ornament and the pretext for an elaborate mythological accessoires — and it entered the vocabulary of painters across Europe through the prints of the Bloemaert workshop and its contemporaries.

Abraham Bloemaert (1566–1651) was one of the defining painters of the Utrecht school, a long-lived master whose pupils included Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerard van Honthorst and Jan Both. His own drawings were translated into engravings by his sons Cornelis and Frederick and by other Utrecht engravers, and those prints circulated through 17th century European art as a common working vocabulary.