JOHANN HEINRICH SCHÖNFELD (BIBERACH AN DER RISS 1609-1682/3 AUGSBURG)

This Bacchanalian scene likely dates to the 1660s, when Schönfeld employed an earthier palette, here utilising a slightly darker ground, with the red-brown tones in the flesh set off against the flashes of orange and blue in the cloth of the dancing women. At this date he also began to elongate his figures, demonstrated here in the sinuousness of the dancing women, as well as in works like his Sacrifice to Diana in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich (inv. 2904/4246). Having lived in Rome following his departure from Germany in 1633, at the height of the Thirty Years' War, the artist clearly took inspiration from the city’s abundant collections of Roman and Greek sculpture, modelling the man standing in the foreground with his back to the viewer on the Farnese Hercules, which he would have known from the Ancient Roman marble version in the Palazzo Farnese. Another version of the present picture is in the Staatsarchiv Thurgau, Switzerland (see P. Herbert, Johann Heinrich Schönfeld: Die Gemälde, Berlin, 1971, p. 163, no. 99, fig. 112).