The Triumph of Bacchus (The Drunkards)
If we were to hand out an award for the “Best Anti-Traditional Myth,” Velázquez’s The Triumph of Bacchus (also known as The Drunkards) in the Prado Museum would absolutely take first place. In typical Western classical paintings, Bacchus, the god of wine, is usually depicted as a noble deity in elegant robes with graceful manners. But here, Velázquez literally drags the lofty god straight down into a fly-infested, 17th-century Spanish village tavern.
Look at the young man in the center with pale skin, wearing a crown of grapevines—that is the god of wine. But now, shift your gaze to his “followers” surrounding him. These are absolutely not legendary satyrs or nymphs; they are genuine, rugged-faced, raggedly dressed Spanish peasants, grinning so widely you can see their missing teeth. The russet-clad uncle on the far right is holding up a bowl of wine, smiling crookedly right at you, as if ready to pull you in for a drunken binge. Velázquez deliberately avoided any over-beautification, painting the lowliest tramps and peasants you’d see on any street corner straight into a mythological scene.
Bring your eyes closer to the wine bowl held by the large-headed old peasant toasting you. In that era, this crude ceramic bowl wasn’t just a drinking vessel; often, even the water inside it wasn’t sanitary. What’s more incredible is the flush on these peasants’ faces—it comes from the weathering of heavy outdoor labor, but even more so from busted capillaries caused by chronic alcoholism. Back then, cheap wine wasn’t just for recreation; it was a cheap anesthetic used by the struggling poor to escape the extreme reality of poverty, hunger, and crushing taxes.
Velázquez was only 29 years old when he painted this, having recently been appointed as a court painter. At the time, Spain was ostensibly still a massive empire spanning Europe and the Americas, but under King Philip IV, the domestic economy was depressed, and the common people lived in hardship. This painting is essentially an act of “stealth rebellion.” While all the court nobles were busy admiring illusory, cloud-floating myths, Velázquez used his firmest brushstrokes to slap the gritty vitality of the lower-class commoners right onto the palace walls—showing that even if they were broke and battered, a single mouthful of cheap wine could grant them fleeting, unadulterated joy.
It is said that this painting was created to please the young King Philip IV. The King loved it so much that he even hung it in his summer palace. What makes it poignant is that in his later years, after suffering countless political defeats and personal bereavements, when the tired King gazed again upon the painting he bought in his youth, he probably would have traded his imperial crown just to swap places with those carefree drunkards for a moment’s anesthesia and revelry. Over the following centuries, this very painting inspired countless modernist masters like Édouard Manet, teaching them how to paint raw, authentic humanity.
If you were to take a seat in this raucous drinking party, would you choose to remain a detached observer like the elegant Bacchus on the left, or would you smile until your face wrinkled and drain that bowl of cheap wine to the very last drop like the old peasant on the right?