What better way to welcome the god of partying than getting wasted?  

The white sails of Bacchus’ ship appear on the horizon. Bacchus has blessed the island of Andros by making her rivers flow with booze, and the people show their appreciation by pre-gaming Animal House style to greet him. Why none of these horny drunks are paying much attention to the hot, naked nymph stretched out in come-hither position is a mystery. The creepy baby flashing everyone next to her seems to be a very effective cock-block. The sheet of music in the bottom center is a drinking ballad, roughly translating to, “He who drinks and doesn’t drink again, doesn’t know what drinking is.”  Now we know where Charlie Sheen got his mantra.

Titian (humble guy that he was) consciously based this scene on a description of a lost masterpiece from antiquity in order to draw comparison between himself and the legendary artist Apelles, said to be the greatest painter of the Classical World.  The male figure leaning on one elbow in the center was based on a cartoon by Michelangelo for The Battle of Cascina, and the neglected nymph was based on an ancient sculpture of Bacchus’ wife Ariadne. Good artists copy, great artists steal. In turn, Rubens copied Titian’s painting, but gave everyone more cellulite.

The Italian nobleman Alfonso I d’Este commissioned this to adorn his famous “Alabaster Room.”  This temple to the arts in his palace at Ferrara featured a triptych of stories about Bacchus: Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, Tiziano’s Bacchus and Ariadne, and this painting.  Alfonso’s obsession with the god of drunks and group sex may have reflected his own proclivity towards hedonistic delights or may have been a chaste metaphor for the fertile Italian countryside, depending on who you believe. I say, two things can be true!  

Alfonso was said to have run through the streets of Ferrara naked, and his second wife was the notorious sexual adventurer Lucrezia Borgia. (Actress Holliday Grainger portrayed Lucrezia in The Borgias, Showtime’s raunchy follow-up to The Tudors.) Both Alfonso and Lucrezia had numerous affairs. Lucrezia’s most salacious of these was with her own brother-in-law, who eventually stopped sleeping with her when he contracted syphilis and didn’t want to pass it on...chivalry in action!  Who knows how many venereal diseases the couple collected, but we do know they collected some great art along the way.