Susan Lücke 377 GOAT`S MILK FOR INFANT GODS. LORENZO

Susan Lücke
377
GOAT'S MILK FOR INFANT GODS.
LORENZO BERNINI'S INFANT BACCHUS MISTAKEN FOR THE
YOUNG JUPITER
O
ne of the highlights in the last retrospective of Gianlorenzo
Bernini's works was a little marble group, most likely the first
opus of the sculptor, datable ca. 1615 : two little boys, who
seem to have just left their cradles, lean against a goat lying on the
ground and turning its head towards one of the children. The latter one,
kneeling on the ground with his left leg, is about to milk the animal, the
other one drinks the milk, overflowing from a shallow cup in his left
hand. Without paying attention, he nonchalantly lifts the tail of the goat
with his right hand thus giving way to the left hand of his companion
that supports the goat's udder. A genre scene representing an everyday
episode in the life of a pastoral people?
The young child enjoying the milk tells a different story. The
animal-like features of his face, the pointed ears, his legs of a goat and
the trace of a tail above his coccyx lead us unmistakably into the realm
of myth: his appearance corresponds exactly to the iconography of the
Greek satyr.
Ever since its rediscovery as a work of Bernini in the 1 9 2 0 ' s , the
under lifesize group has always been interpreted as the infant Jupiter
and the goat Amalthea with a little satyr.
The well known myth of Zeus (the Roman Jupiter), the childhood
of the supreme Olympian god, leads us to a bucolic ambience. The
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"Gianlorenzo Bernini. Regista del Barocco", Rome: Palazzo Venezia, 21
maggio-16 settembre 1999. Catalogue by Skira, Milan, 1999.
Marble, h. 0,45 m.; Rome, Villa Borghese, Inv. N. CXV111. As to the date,
see note 9.
Roberto Longhi, Vita artistica 1, no. 30 (1926), p. 25. Unfortunately this title
was not available to me, but Longhi entitles the marble group "Giove
fanciullo", only two years later, in his "Precisioni nelle Gallerie Italiane I. R.
Galleria Borghese", Rome 1928, p. 48.
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Susan Lücke
378
newborn baby, threatened by his father Cronus, who eats his own
children (afraid as he was that one of them would take over the rule
when grown up), is hidden and then taken to the Curetes and the
nymphs Adrastia and Ida by his mother Rea, who deceives her husband
by means of a stone wrapped in diapers. The nymphs feed little Zeus on
the milk of the goat Amalthea, and the Curetes bang their spears on
their shields in order to create noise to drown the child's c r y i n g .
The goat immediately attracts attention by the mere fact of bearing
a name and thus being personalized. All it needs is somebody familiar
with ancient myths to realize that this one is none other than the myth
of the infant Zeus and his nurse Amalthea with a little satyr. The first to
recognize this may well have been Jacomo Manilli, who, in his
description of Villa Borghese in Rome of 1650 , entitles it as follows:
"La capra Amalthea, con Giove bambino, e con un Satiretto" . But
knowledge can blind. It evidently hindered Manilli from scrutinizing
the little milker at close quarters otherwise he would have noticed the
wreath of leaves on his head tied at the back. Another scholar, D.
Montelatici, has noticed it, as reaveals his description of Villa Borghese
of the year 1700 . However, he wrongly speaks of ivy instead of vine
leaves, and draws the right conclusion that its bearer must be the infant
Bacchus. Montelatici, he too, a victim of a preconception? He evidently
knows about the "Bacchus hederatus", the wine-god, who in Greek and
Roman antiquity always bears a garland of ivy (= hedera) leaves. But
Bernini's infant god is without any doubt crowned by a wreath of vine
leaves, as was the practice in Renaissance and Baroque art . Whether
ivy or vine both identify the little boy as Dionysus/Bacchus the
satyr is sure, once grown up and then drunken with wine, to follow the
god in the staggering frenzy of the thiasos.
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Hesiod, Theogony, 453-501; Apollodorus, The Library 1, 1,6; Kallimachos,
Hymn to Zeus, 15; Strabon of Amascia, Geographika, 8, 7, 5.
Jacomo Manilli, Villa Borghese fuori di Porta Pinciana, Rome, 1650, p. 91.
Manilli does not know about the authorship of Bernini, but calls the group a
work of an anonymous, which is not unusual until Bernini's authorship was
recognized by Roberto Longhi, in 1926, see above. Max von Boohn, Lorenzo
Bernini. Seine Zeit, sein Leben, sein Werk, Bielefeld and Leipzig 1912; on the
other hand, Manilli declares the work, whose description he knows from the
earlier sources, for lost; compare also A. R. Peltzer in his edition of Sandrarts'
"Teutsche Academie [...]" (see below) of 1925, note 1264.
D. Montelatici, Villa Borghese fuori di Porta Pinciana, Rome, 1700, p. 262.
See, for example, the painting by Guido Reni, "Infant Bacchus Drinking", ca.
1623, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister.
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Lorenzo Bernini's Infant Bacchus
379
So, paradoxically, the visual evidence proves the testimony of the
written sources, reaching back to the time of the origin of Bernini's
little group. There is no document that refers to this sculpture directly,
but the bill of the joiner Giovanni Battista Soria for a wooden pedestal
dated 18 August 1615 alludes to a group consisting of a goat and a
"baco" for which the pedestal was made . Today, there is general
agreement that the mentioned sculpture is identical with the group of
the young Bernini.
Joachim Sandrart in his "Teutsche Académie" of 1679 speaks of
"zwey baccantische Knäblein", which constitutes one of the earliest
testimonies, since his Roman collection of material dates back as early
as 1629.
Montelatici (1650) in his detailed description mentions an infant
Bacchus crowned by ivy leaves, milking a goat and a little satyr
drinking the milk in a bowl.
Bernini's Bacchus corresponds accurately to the iconography of
the god. However, Bernini shows much more than just a superficially
iconographic knowledge: this early work of his seems to reveal a deep
insight into the nature of the Greek Dionysus who is no Olympian god
from the beginning, but one who has to "merit" such a rank, and the
artist succeeds in portraying that with remarkable courage. Quite
different the situation with Zeus. Most of the representations
concerning his childhood in the arts show the future ruler of Olympus
served by the nymphs with his entourage, so to speak. The fate of the
newborn Dionysus is very much like that of Zeus: he, too, is in danger,
threatened not by Cronus but by the jealous Hera since he was the
son of Semele, a mistress of Zeus, who delivers the child to Hermes to
take to the nymphs who care for the baby and nurse him . So the son
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Bill for a pedestal "di noce fatto quadro per metter sopra caprette et baco" by
the "falegname" Giovanni Battista Soria, dated 18 August (Archivio Borghese);
published by Italo Falvi, Note sulle sculture Borghesìane del Bernini, in
Bollettino d'Arte, 1952, pp. 140-46.
Joachim von Sandrart, "Teutsche Academie der Bau, Bild, und MahlereyKünste", Nürnberg 1675-80, p. 285.
Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses 3, 314 sq.; Diodorus Siculus, The
Library 4, 4, 3; Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogia deorum gentilium 5, 25; cf.
Apollodorus, The Library, ed. Harvard/William Heinemann Ltd., London,
1976, Vol. l , p . 321.
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Susan Lücke
380
(Dionysus) repeats the fate of the father (Zeus). But the infant
Dionysus seems to be much more independent, one could even say that
he reveals his authority from the very beginning, not in a spectacular
way like Hermes, but silently, modestly, and nevertheless with the
authority of a professional, just as one can see in Giovanni Bellini's
"Feast of the Gods" . Here Bacchus is the only one among the gods
represented as a child. With curly blond hair, dressed in white and
shining blue, he kneels on the ground and is about to pour wine from a
barrel into a glass jug. Modest and yet professional just like Bernini's
little "Bacco" milking the goat. And there is another feature common to
both of them: their serving function (this would not be a decorum for
Jupiter, the supreme god, either!). Just as Bellini's infant Bacchus
serves the Olympian gods as wine-waiter, so the Bacco of Bernini has
provided the little satyr first and only then shows him putting the
nourishing liquid into his own bowl; one even has the impression that
he pauses from exhaustion. This has an aura of self-sacrificing and
should not be surprising if the post-antique allegorese sees in the pagan
god a préfiguration of Christ .
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Still the question remains why art history took up an old
misinterpretation (or, again, was it a victim of the same error?) when
it rediscovered the little group at the beginning of our century instead
of following the written sources which tell the correct title: Bacchus
with a goat and a little satyr.
SUSAN LÜCKE
Munich
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Washington, National Gallery of Art.
Maurizio Calvesi, "Dosso e il 'sacramento' di Bacco", in Storia dell'Arte 46
(1982), pp. 209-13.
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