The Four Festivals: Festival of Bacchus

The lovely bacchantes (female followers of Bacchus) dancing throughout the composition appear in contrast with the beastly satyrs and fauns. The term bacchante could also be used to describe an intoxicated and libidinous woman in less mythological contexts.

Description

The principal source of inspiration for Claude Gillot, while working in Paris during the final years of the reign of Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715), was popular theater. His staged and precisely choreographed bacchanalia scene consists of music, dancing bacchants, drinking, and plentiful food, all symmetrically composed around a herm (a stone pillar topped by the head of Bacchus). According to written sources in Gillot’s time, a herm marked a site in ancient Greece where rites to Bacchus occurred. At the far right, a young satyr holds a thyrsus—a wand decorated with grape leaves and ivy—a bacchanalian symbol of fertility and hedonism.