Triumph of Bacchus 1607 - 1678

Erasmus Quellinus created this drawing, Triumph of Bacchus, using pen and brown ink. Quellinus was a Flemish Baroque painter from a family of artists working in 17th century Antwerp, then part of the Spanish Netherlands. This drawing depicts a classical subject, Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, fertility, and theatre. Bacchus is shown here being celebrated by a large retinue of mythological figures. Looking at this image today, we see an imagined vision of a world in which the body is not a site of constraint but pleasure. The reclining nude evokes a long art historical tradition of male artists depicting the female nude for the pleasure of a male viewer. However, Quellinus flips this trope, and it’s possible to consider this a queer image, as he places a male nude at the center of the composition. Consider how the history of representation impacts our reading of images in the present.