The Bacchus is a marble sculpture by Jacopo Sansovino, datable to 1515 and preserved in the Bargello National Museum in Florence.
The work was created to decorate the garden of Giovanni Bartolini in Florence, as part of a recovery of classical antiquity promoted by the Neoplatonic Academy. Later it was bought by Cosimo I and went to decorate his apartment in Palazzo Vecchio with Baccio Bandinelli's sculpture of Bacchus, and Ganimede by Benvenuto Cellini. It is not clear if the artist had a precise ancient model as a reference or if it was an intepretation of the past, among other things very effective in recreating a pagan flavour. The statue in fact evokes the pagan myth of Bacchus, here represented as a young god who joyfully raises the basin with which the ancients drank wine, smiling.
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