Bacchus

A boy poses as Bacchus, half-dressed in a bedsheet, offering a glass of wine. He looks tired, drunk, human. And in the fruit bowl on the table between us and him: apples spotted with brown worm-holes, grapes marked with black mould, a pomegranate split and bruised. Bacchus was traditionally the god of ripe abundance — every earlier painter idealised his fruit. Caravaggio painted decay. He insisted the real was more truthful than the ideal. The fruit is going bad. So is the boy. Now at Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence @uffizigalleries