The Bacchanal of the Andrians

Gorgeous colour gives life to the picture and the desired effect to this scene of wanton merry-making ~ Georg Gronau

The Bacchanal of the Andrians or The Andrians is an oil painting by Titian, dated to 1523–1526.

Quotes

• The fiery gift of the god is pouring out like a stream from a hill in the background and has loosened all restraint. Bronze-faced men and voluptuously beautiful women give themselves up to enjoyment. "Chi boist et ne reboit ne çais qua boir soit" is the device we read on a roll of music lying in front on the ground. So the dark-eyed beauty holds her cup aloft into which a cup-bearer is pouring the wine, another raises a half-filled crystal cup, one fat reveller drinks from a large jug and another catches the liquid as it flows along the ground like a stream. Here a man and woman are dancing together, their garments fluttering in the wind, whilst in the foreground a fair bacchante, completely nude and overcome by the fumes of wine, has fallen down fast asleep.
• Gorgeous colour gives life to the picture and the desired effect to this scene of wanton merry-making. The warm glow of a summer's day lights up the landscape, the sky is of a deep blue, over which white clouds are slowly rising. Heads, an upraised arm, a single figure stand out dark against this background. The contrast of the dark bodies of the men with the radiant forms of the women is softened by their white and coloured garments. The left half of the picture is overshadowed by a group of trees; the forms of the sleeping nymph and the dancing pair shine out in bright light.
  • Georg Gronau, Titian (1904), pp. 56–57

• The darkening and patching of the base of this masterpiece ... have obscured the beautiful motive, the river of wine, which was the principal item Titian had to illustrate. Pressed from heaped-up grapes by the Polyphemus-like figure upon the heights, the wine, trickling among the hollows of the hill, flows past the sleeping figure in the foreground, who still holds a cup, whilst her hair pours over a gilded jar with which she had come to gather wine; near her, a glass, half submerged by the rush of the current, sinks into the brook which flows past the revellers gathered at its brink to form into a pool from which a Satyr and a Silenus gather it in flasks and goblets. One of the revellers holds a crystal jar against the light; in the bay beyond a large foolish ship basks and lingers in the sun. Titian is here a prodigal of details so delicate and at times so homely that we are plunged into a feeling of amazed delight. On a few yards of painted cloth Titian has condensed all the inimitable magic of some other 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' These Dryads and Nymphs are at truce with Oberon and his fairy court, the most beautiful imaginings and recollections,—thoughts full of voluptuous melancholy, half thoughts, implied silences and visible sounds, each follows each, pauses and passes like the movement of some silent music played in the secret places of the mind. Titian has painted the very hum of the revel, he evokes in us a strange blend of emotions, and a sense of something which is fugitive in its essence, as time or pleasure, caught for this once and made perpetual.
• Such is the magic of this work, that we hesitate to admit to ourselves that time and neglect have after all had their say, and that it has suffered from rehandling and restoration. The picture has been flayed, and the left-hand portion of the design badly damaged; patches of repainting have marred the horizon and sky, the reveller who lifts the jar of wine against the light, the singers beyond the bending faun, and the nearest woman who holds the flute. Damaged portions alternate with exquisite passages of well-preserved painting; the restorations seem for some reason or other to have been very drastic where they have occurred, and the last connecting glazes have been removed; it might therefore be described as 'flayed' ... and also badly damaged in part.
  • Charles Ricketts, Titian (1910), pp. 57–58