The Infant Bacchus

probably 1505/1510 · Painting

Can I see it?

Yes, on view now

Where is “The Infant Bacchus” now? National Gallery of Art, Gallery 13 · West Building, Main Floor, Washington, D.C. Yes, on view now. Checked September 29, 2026.

National Gallery of Art

Washington, D.C., United States

Room13 · West Building, Main Floor

On public display.

Checked: 10 days ago
In this state since: Aug 19, 2026
Source: The museum

On the map Museum page

About the painting

The Infant Bacchus or Young Bacchus is a ca. 1505–1510 painting of the Roman god Bacchus as a boy by the Italian Renaissance master Giovanni Bellini. Originally painted on panel, it was later transferred to canvas.

It was probably the Little Bacchus with a vase in his hand seen in Bartolo Delfino's house in Venice by Carlo Ridolfi in the mid-16th century and misidentified as a Giorgione. Shipley (1979) believes the subject is a metaphor for the winter solstice, based on a letter in Macrobius's Saturnalia, known during the Renaissance – the new year started as a baby and ended as an old man. It may be drawn from the same studies as the figure of Bacchus in The Feast of the Gods, which is very similar.

Read on

By the 19th century it was in Frederick Richards Leyland's collection in London, where it was thought to be by Marco Basaiti. It passed through several further collections before being acquired by the Duveen Brothers in 1927, who took it to the United States. There it was acquired by Samuel H. Kress, who in 1961 gave it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it still hangs.

Wikipedia CC BY-SA

Details

Accession number: 1961.9.5

What it shows

Bacchus

In the catalog

Paintings Oil Italian painting Venetian painting Renaissance 16th century Venetian Mythological painting

Sources

National Gallery of Art
Image: National Gallery of Art — Museum open access

In the life of Giovanni Bellini

The whole life

1501–1505
Isabella Gonzaga and commissions without paintings
In 1501–04 the Marchioness of Mantua, Isabella Gonzaga (also known as Isabella d'Este), has great difficulty obtaining from Bellini a painting of the Madonna and Saints, for which she has already paid in advance (it is now lost). In 1505 she tries through Pietro Bembo to commission another, of secular or mythological content; its subject and fate are unknown.
1506
Meeting Dürer in Venice
On Albrecht Dürer's second visit to Venice he calls Bellini very old but still the best in painting, and full of courtesy toward foreign fellow painters. In a letter to Pirckheimer Dürer reports that Bellini praised him before many gentlemen and came himself to ask for a work, promising to pay well.
1507
The death of his brother Gentile
After Gentile's death Giovanni inherits their father Jacopo's sketchbook, on condition that he finish a picture his brother left incomplete. Marin Sanudo notes that Gentile's brother Zuan Belin remains, the most excellent painter in Italy.

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