93. SILENUS GATHERING GRAPES.
Annibale Carracci (Eclectic-Bologna: 1560-1609). See 9.
Silenus in a leopard skin, the nurse and preceptor of Bacchus, the wine-god, is being hoisted by two attendant fauns, so that with his own hands he may pick the grapes. This and the companion picture, 94, originally decorated a harpsichord.
94. BACCHUS PLAYING TO SILENUS.[92]
Annibale Carracci (Eclectic-Bologna: 1560-1609). See 9.
A clever picture of contrasts. The old preceptor is leering and pampered, yet with something of a schoolmaster's gravity, "half inclining to the brute, half conscious of the god." The young pupil—like the shepherd boy in Sidney's Arcadia, "piping as though he should never be old"—is "full of simple careless grace, laughing in youth and beauty; he holds the Pan's pipe in both hands, and looks up with timid wonder, with an expression of mingled delight and surprise at the sounds he produces" (Hazlitt: Criticisms upon Art, p. 6).
These two pictures—together with the "Lot" and "Susannah" of Guido (193 and 196)—used to hang in the Lancellotti Palace in Rome. Lanzi describes our picture, No. 94, as one of the principal treasures of that collection. It is exquisitely finished, he says; the figures are "at once designed, coloured, and disposed with the hand of a great master" (Bohn's translation, iii. 79).