A False Bacchus Crowning Drunkards

Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Rendering Velázquez’s complex composition in etching presented Goya with a considerable challenge. His determination to analyze and understand the painting—its interlocking forms and varied expressions—is evident in his preparatory drawing. Notwithstanding Goya’s careful observation, both the drawing and the print depart from the model. In the print, the figures are distinctly rougher and more brazen. Velázquez’s Bacchus is a fleshy, distracted youth, shown crowning a figure who kneels before him. Goya rendered the god as more mature and shrewd, in league with those around him, whose inebriation is also more pronounced. These modifications appear intentional; Goya may have felt empowered to submit his own reading, just as Velázquez did by surrounding his classical god with figures that were recognizably of the seventeenth century.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art