Diana Offered Wine and Fruit by the Young Bacchus and his Retinue

Entry

The initials on the reverse are those of the panel maker Michiel Vriendt, who became a master in the Antwerp guild in the accounting year September 1615 to September 1616. He died on 11 August 1637.¹⁰ He is known to have supplied supports to Hendrik van Balen I.¹¹

The attribution of the figures to Van Balen is traditional and is rightly accepted by Werche. Although Jan Brueghel I’s (1568-1625) collaboration was recognized in the eighteenth century and the painting was acquired as a joint work by the two artists, Brueghel’s participation has not been acknowledged in the museum’s catalogues since 1872, when the distant view is simply described as ‘in his style’. Brueghel’s hand, however, is evident in the fruit, dead birds, dog, goat, implements of the chase, enamel urn and wine cup. In fact, it is possible that the trees, landscape and sky are not by Brueghel but by a third hand working in his studio. Werche has reviewed the two artists’ long collaboration.¹²

The Rijksmuseum picture has been dated by Werche to Van Balen’s activity between 1616 and 1625.¹³ The earlier date is derived from Vriendt’s entry as a free master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke. Further support for this view is derived from Klein’s dendrochronological dating of the use of the support. In fact the terminus post quem should be advanced to 1617 as the Antwerp brand on the reverse is that which was in use from then until 1637.¹⁴ Jan Brueghel I’s death on 13 January 1625 provides the terminus ante quem for the picture’s completion. It may be that the work was executed in the early 1620s rather than in the second half of the second decade.

The reason for this lies in the unusual subject matter, for there is apparently no classical, literary source for the meeting of Bacchus and his retinue with Diana returning from or resting after the chase. Bacchus was the god of wine, and is depicted here youthful and drunk with companion satyrs, infant Bacchants and Bacchantes, and his emblematic goat. The goddess Diana, identified by the crescent moon on her forehead, was the virgin huntress. It may be that Van Balen and Brueghel were inspired by or reacting to Peter Paul Rubens’s Diana Returning from the Chase of circa 1622-23,¹⁵ in which the goddess is accosted by satyrs bearing fruit, of which the half-length version at Dresden¹⁶ was engraved by Schelte Adamsz Bolswert (1585/1588-1659). Even if the engraving dates from after Rubens’s death in 1640, the rubric may still have relevance to the meaning earlier attached to the encounter: ‘Thus may you have the reward of maidenly efforts: fruit and game are fine companions [go well together] at a feast.’¹⁷ In the Rijksmuseum picture, wine, personified by Bacchus and brought in the barrel, has been added to the feast.

Here the arrangement of Bacchus and his entourage more or less repeats that devised by Hans Rottenhammer (1564-1625) for his Feast of the Gods with the Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne of 1602, in which Jan Brueghel I added the accessories of tableware, edibles, landscape, etc.¹⁸ A Feast of the Gods at Leipzig by Van Balen,¹⁹ follows the configuration, which has been slightly altered however in the Amsterdam painting, notably in the inclination of Bacchus’s head and the vomiting infant satyr and companion. Although some of the accessories, the landscape, background, and figures in the Leipzig painting differ from those in the Rottenhammer Feast, Brueghel’s role is not acknowledged by Werche. These elements and the placement of the goat (plus the introduction of the hound and dead birds, etc.) differ markedly in the present painting with its different subject, and there seems no reason to doubt that here they are the work of Brueghel, as is proposed above with a caveat concerning the landscape. Werche dates the Leipzig painting circa 1605-06.²⁰ Van Balen probably made a copy of the Rottenhammer when it was in Brueghel’s studio, which he would have used first for the Leipzig painting and then partially altered the god and his entourage when devising the present meeting of Diana and Bacchus.

The theme of Bacchus being carried by satyrs and the god’s bloated physiognomy may have been prompted by Agostino Veneziano’s (1490-1540) print, said to be after the antique, of Bacchus Carried by Satyrs of 1528.²¹ The motif of the vomiting infant satyr is unusual; Van Balen also used it in his Allegory of Autumn of circa 1616 in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich.²² Also unusual is Van Balen’s witty idea of showing the nymph carrying a barrel of wine; the wine was for the feast but the barrel was also for Bacchus to sit on, as in, for instance, Jacques Jonghelinck’s (1530-1606) famous sculpture.²³

Gregory Martin, 2022