Notes on Poussinʼs use of antique sources in his early works

Pierre Rosenberg first reproduced it as an autograph painting by Poussin, although marginally and without commentary, in the catalogue of a Poussin retrospective in Paris in 1994.* 4 Timothy J. Standring, who first fully explored the provenance as well as the style and iconography of the painting, dated it in the context of a number of Poussinʼs early bacchanalian pictures, almost all of which are undocumented in primary sources and generally considered on stylistic grounds, as having been painted sometime between mid⊖1625 and mid⊖1627.In the catalogue of an exhibition of Poussinʼs early works in 1999, Denis Mahon gave the more definite date of early 1628.* 5On the left of the composition, the infant Bacchus, identifiable by his ivy wreath, is shown riding a goat.He is tenderly supported from behind by a nymph, and they are followed by a faun carrying a sack in his right hand and a stick in his left.To the right, another faun enters a cave beside a spring, reminding us that the setting of the picture is Mount Nysa, the place where Bacchus was raised, described in literary sources such as Ovidʼs Metamorphoses (III; 258⊖315) and Philostratusʼs Imagines (I; 14).* 6 Neither of these ancient writers, however, describe a scene in which the infant Bacchus rides a goat.It has been widely held that Poussinʼs early paintings related to Bacchus were dependent in both subject matter and style upon Titianʼs great Bacchanals, found in the Aldobrandini and Ludovisi collections in Rome at the time,* 7 which included The Feast of the Gods (begun by Giovanni Bellini) in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Bacchus and Ariadne in the National Gallery of Art, London, and The Bacchanal of the Andrians ［fig.2］ and The Worship of Venus ［fig.3］ , both in the Museo Nacional del Prado.This view certainly seems to hold true for the stylistic aspects of The Infancy of Bacchus in London.A number of Titianesque elements can be identified in this pastoral landscape with rich brownish green foliage, including the painterly handling of the imagery, the effective use of golden sunlight and a warm colour scheme, and the elegiac tone dominating the whole scene.The iconography of the Fig.