Word: silenus
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This presence of the antique, which was an obsessive and recurrent aspect of all artists' experience in Rome or Naples, surfaces elsewhere in Ribera's work, sometimes in a disguised form. Looking at the great white belly-bulge of his Drunken Silenus, 1626, one sees it as gross and comic. Yet there may be something more behind it; namely, the sarcophagus figures of Etruscan bigwigs, each displaying his un-ideal paunch, a common sight around Rome...
Throughout his life, which was flushed with publicity, Diego Rivera was often photographed. He filled the frame--a 300-lb. Silenus in suspenders and open- neck shirt, the liquid eyes bulging at the rival lens. One image shows him feigning sleep. He lies mountainously in the garden of his house in Coyoacan, his head pillowed on the stony side of an eroded pre-Columbian head. He is pretending to be a big baby dozing by his mother, the Mexican past, touching the root of contentment. No other photo so pungently expresses Rivera's idea of his own history...
...wish Cole would write a real unpretentious comedy some day. I wonder if Harvard is good for somebody as clever as Cole; it's filled his head up with a set of allusions it will take him ten years to forget. But, pedantry aside, Bacchus and his father Silenus are two really engaging comic characters you won't forget: Bacchus (who is crowned with myrtle, but wears shades and is hip) is William Keough, who is almost as good as Allan Mandel, the drunken old God who gives imitations of Mars trapped in the net at parties, and who chases...
...protector of virgins, lies dozing in one corner of the picture while Priapus fiddles with her skirt. A blowsy Ceres helps Apollo hoist cup to lip. Neptune is paired off with Gaea, who holds a quince -the symbol of marriage. Bacchus appears as a child, and his foster father Silenus looks more like a slender ascetic than a roly-poly satyr. Generations of art scholars have wondered...
From contemporary portraits and medallions, Wind has identified Mercury as Alfonso's brother Ippolito, Silenus as Pietro Bembo (who later became a cardinal), Silvanus as Painter Bellini himself. Since the Feast was finished several years after the wedding, Alfonso's son Ercole might have played the barrel-tapping little Bacchus...