While it is first listed in 1666 at the Alcázar, where it hung alongside Ribera’s Fable of Bacchus or Teoxenia (of which only three fragments have survived: two at the Museo del Prado and one in a private collection), this work’s subject and dimensions suggest it may originally have been commissioned for the Buen Retiro Palace. Along with Finoglia’s Triumph of Bacchus (P7309), Poussin’s Sacrifice to Priapus (São Paulo, Museu de Arte Assis Chateaubrand) and other paintings, it would have been part of an uneven group of works depicting the pagan cults of Antiquity. Its style indicates it was painted around 1634-1635, at the same time as Ribera’s work and around the same dates as the four scenes of the life of Saint John the Baptist (Museo del Prado), which Stanzione painted for the Buen Retiro Palace -possible for the hermitage of Saint John in the palace gardens. The Viceroy of Naples, Count of Monterrey, must have commissioned it directly from the artist, who was then the most outstanding native-born painter still based in that city. It shows a group of women and children bearing offerings of flowers, fruit and wine to a chubby statue of Bacchus who wears a wreath of leaves on his head and carries a thyrsus. These figures are the Bacchantes of Thebes, who worship the god of wine born to Jupiter and Semele. Wrapped in furs and adorned with ivy and grape leaves, they are shown shouting frenetically, aroused by wine (Ovid, Metamorphoses II), playing flutes and tambourines and dancing uninhibitedly. The goat being ridden by a child on the left, and the woodcock carried by a woman at the far right are probably both intended for the sacrifice. Two children are pulling grapes out of a bucket, and one squeezes the juice into his mouth. Stanzione modeled this work after three mythological paintings (1518-1523) that Titian made for Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara: Offering to Venus and Bacchanal of the Andrians (both at the Museo del Prado), and Bacchus and Ariadne (London, National Gallery), which Stanzione must have seen in Rome. While there are no literal quotes, his dependence on Titian’s earlier works is visible in how the figures are turned, how their clothing hangs, the importance assigned to details of the still life (one of the work’s most attractive aspects), the vessels and musical instruments that stand out against the sky, and the intensity of the colors (Text drawn from Finaldi, G. in: Fábulas de Velázquez. Mitología e Historia Sagrada en el Siglo de Oro, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007, p. 315).