Label Text:
The Children’s Bacchanal is a print by the French engraver Nicolas Beatrizet after a beautiful drawing by the Renaissance master Michelangelo. Michelangelo made this drawing as a gift for his friend Tommaso de’ Cavalieri around 1532. The work was part of a series of four drawings that all suggest a deeper Neo-Platonist meaning. Of the four works, The Children’s Bacchanal is generally considered the most enigmatic. The famous art historian Erwin Panofsky interpreted it as an image depicting the lowest level of human existence, “a sphere of a purely vegetable life.” HKDV
The Neo-Platonists argued that the lower soul was “that nature which we have in common with all the animals.” However, the creatures Michelangelo chose to illustrate this lower life are not animals, or monsters, but children; rounded mischievous children, while the only two adults depicted are an old female satyr suckling a child from a withered breast and an unconscious nude male. While children were frequently used to symbolize elemental human urges, this image casts them as being incapable of reason or self-control, as stand-ins for adult wantonness and vice.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1944.12.5 |
