<i>Il Bravo</i>

CAI.97 appears to be a 16th century copy of Titian's painting of ca. 1521-23 in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna of roughly the same dimensions. The Vienna picture is recorded as in the home of Zuan Antonio Venier in Venice in 1528 and in the collection of Bartolomeo della Nave in the same city by 1648, suggesting that the V&A copy was painted there around this time. However, the V&A picture lacks the luminescent colouring, skilled handling of light and the same attention to detail visible in Titian's original. There are also some differences in the facial expression of the youth.

The subject represented is still debated, with scholars divided as to whether it depicts an episode from Plutarch's Life of Marius in which Caius Lucius attacks Trebonius or a subject derived from Euripides' Bacchae and Ovid's Metamorphoses,: Bacchus' arrest by Pentheus, the king of Thebes, who opposed the spread of his cult. The identification of the scene with Bacchus is supported by the crown of vine leaves worn by the young man and his mane of blond hair, also visible in Titian's representation of the god in the Bacchus and Ariadne (London, National Gallery, NG35). Several other copies of the Vienna picture are known.