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Arca di San Domenico San Petronio San Petronio Statue of candle bearing angel Saint Dominic (1170–1221) by Fra Angelico BACCHUS Completed by 1497, this marble sculpture depicts Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, in a drunken pose. Commissioned by Raffaele Riario, a high-ranking Cardinal and collector of antique sculpture, the completed piece was rejected by him and bought instead by Jacopo Galli, Riario’s banker and good friend to Michelangelo. Along with the Pietà, the Bacchus is one of only two surviving sculptures from the artist’s first period in Rome.

With its swollen breast and abdomen, the Bacchus figure has often been noted for its androgynous quality, which may have been inspired by Donatello’s statue of David, housed in the Bargello. The inspiration for the statue appears to be the description in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History of a lost bronze sculpture by Praxiteles, depicting “Bacchus, Drunkenness and a satyr”. Bacchus wears a wreath of ivy leaves, as that plant was sacred to the god. In his right hand he grips a goblet of wine and in his left the skin of a tiger, an animal associated with the god for its love of the grape.

The saint is beset by temptations, which he resists whilst being ambushed in mid-air by the devils. The painting was previously attributed to the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, under whom Michelangelo had served his apprenticeship. Under that attribution it was bought at a Sotheby’s auction in July 2008 by an American art dealer for $2 million. When the export license was obtained that September, the canvas was brought to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it was cleaned of discoloured varnish and later overpainting and closely examined for the first time.