I USED TO GIVE GALLERY TALKS on Italian art, especially the paintings of Titian. Everyone’s favourite canvas was always his Bacchus and Ariadne in the National Gallery with its lapis lazuli sky and cheetah-drawn carriage and throng of revellers who are too drunk to care. People rarely asked what was going on between the two main characters. It’s obvious that the wine god is experiencing love at first sight. The question I received most often was rather: who is the man with the snakes at the right of the picture?
The simple answer is that he’s a member of Bacchus’s throng. The more complicated one is that he represents an early copy of — or at least a response to — an ancient sculpture of Laocoön, the
