The Infant Bacchus

Giovanni Bellini

National Gallery of Art

A young, pale-skinned boy wearing a brilliant blue toga sits on a rock and holds a gold pitcher in a landscape in this vertical painting. The boy’s body faces us, and he leans onto his right hand, to our left, so his body and head tip in that direction. He wears a leafy crown over long blond curls. He looks slightly up with wide-set, light brown eyes. He has round, rosy cheeks, and his pink lips are parted. He holds the gold pitcher up in his left hand, to our right. One foot rests on a rock and the other stretches long, to our right. A thin tree grows diagonally up and to our right from behind the outstretched foot, and another tree grows a short distance beyond. Behind the boy, green hills roll back to the horizon, which comes three-quarters of the way up the composition. Mountains, which are blue in the hazy distance, line the horizon under a sky streaked with ivory white above the peaks and topaz blue above.