Bacchus

Executed in Rome in 1496-97 for the collector Jacopo Galli, this is Michelangelo's extraordinary response to the demands of a private taste for the refined and allusive evocation of pagan myths and classical beauty; for the same patron he also carved a “Cupid-Apollo”, now lost. Hellenistic anecdote, with all its pleasantly descriptive apparatus, is brutally bent by Michelangelo's genius to a personal and biting expressive will, which pitilessly probes a precise human condition.