Where the Stream Is Wine

Titian’s The Bacchanal of the Andrians is a painting about wine and what it does to an island. This slow art journey moves through the dancers and drinkers on Andros, past the sheet of music held up among them, down to the sleeping nude stretched out in the foreground, oblivious to all of it. Colour does the work here: deep blue sky, red and white drapery, flushed skin. Titian paints pleasure without tipping it into comedy. This work can be seen at The Museo Nacional del Prado.