Caravaggio painted Bacchus in approximately 1596 in his Rome workshop in the Palazzo Madama household of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, his first major Roman patron. The 95 × 85 centimetre oil-on-canvas shows a teenage boy in classical Roman drape and an oversized ivy-and-grape garland, offering a glass of red wine directly out of the canvas. The 1922 conservation analysis found Caravaggio's own face in the mirror reflection on the carafe.

A pointing hand. A shaft of light through a tavern window. Five tax collectors at a table looking up. Caravaggio painted the founding scene of European Baroque in 1599, and every painter for the next forty years tried to figure out how.