The Bacchanal is one of the three paintings made by Titian for a room in the palace of Alfonso d'Este at Ferrara. At Alfonso's suggestion the painting followed a description by Philostratus of a painting he had seen which represented the mythical island of Andros. According to Philostratus, Dionysius so charged the earth of Andros with wine ‘that it bursts forth and sends up a river… . the men, crowned with ivy and byrony are singing to their wives and children, some dancing … some reclining. And very likely … this is the theme of their song— … that this river makes men rich, and powerful in the assembly, and helpful to their friends, and beautiful and, instead of short, four cubits tall; for when a man has drunk his fill of it he can assemble all these qualities and in his thought make them his own. This is what you should imagine you hear and what some of them are really singing, though their voices are thick with wine.’

When last year I returned to Florence for a long stretch of work, I was overwhelmed by the amount and completeness of the material preserved in the Archives and in the Libraries, though previous experience should have prepared me for what I would find. One becomes strikingly aware of the spottiness with which the material of the Archives has been used in our histories of the Renaissance, and one begins to feel rather critical of the trend in present Renaissance literature towards basing new theories on reinterpretations of the material which nineteenth century historians discovered, instead of turning to the wealth of unused source material. Hardly a day passes when one does not leave the Archives either complaining about the fact that a fundamental source —on whose deciphering one scholar after the other has to spend precious time—remains unpublished, or filled with suggestions for work which ought to be undertaken.