House of Eleutherios

In this work, artist Michael Allen Lowe has portrayed a scene of characters at a feast. The leftmost figure is Dionysus, depicted as a personification of Deceit, from Anthony van Dyck’s ‘Venetia, Lady Digby, as Prudence’ (c.1634). Cupid, the winged god of erotic love, sleeps in the foreground beneath two nude women copied from Henry Fuseli’s ‘The Incubus Leaving Two Sleeping Women [in Ecstasy]’ (c.1810). These illustrative nude figures transform the environment into a bacchanal as a scene of heightened indulgence, through the abundance of wine, feasting, madness, and ecstasy alluding to (Bacchus) the later Roman adaptation of the wine god.