It is passing strange that the artists of the Renaissance did not attempt to lift Bacchus out of the ditch of ignominy into which he had fallen. They seem to have taken their ideas from the recorded accounts of the Roman rites and vine festivals, overlooking the Grecian suggestions relating to Dionysus, and even the later restrained reliefs picturing incidents in his history. In their art, however, as is evidenced by Pompeian frescoes, the Romans often treated Bacchus in a serious manner, associating him with higher interests than those connected with festival orgies. It may be that the figure of the god carved by Michelangelo[a] had something to do with the later coarse representations of him, for it would have been impossible for artists succeeding so great a sculptor, to ignore the types he created. But it will be an eternal mystery how he came to design such a Bacchus. A voluptuous semi-realistic god, opposed to everything else that was conceived by the sculptor, and antagonistic to all that was known in Greece, it can never be anything more than a sublime example of a purely earthly figure. One stands amazed before the perfect modelling, but aghast at the conception. It represents the most extraordinary transition from the god-like man of the Greeks, to a man-like god, ever seen in art. [a] In the Bargello, Florence. The painter then has little left to use of the conventional Bacchus and his history, except the never-dying Ariadne, but there is nothing to prevent him from reverting to the pastoral Dionysus, to the delightful abodes of the nymphs his foster-mothers, where Pan played and the Muses sang, while the never-tiring son of Maia breathed tales of love into willing ears. VULCAN The poet may continue to hold our fancy with volcanic fires and cyclopean hammers, but on canvas Etna becomes a blacksmith's forge, and the figure of a begrimed human toiler is given to the divinity responsible for the golden handmaids, and the brazen bull whose breath was scorching flame. There is rarely a painting of Vulcan without a forge and leather bellows, with a smith who is stripped to the waist, which earthly things necessarily kill all suggestions of celestial interest, notwithstanding the presence of Venus, or the never-fading bride of palsied Peleus. Occasionally we have the incident with Mars, and strangely look for the invisible net, but not finding it we are immediately called back to earth to ponder over the wiles of the ancient legend gatherers. The art is lost behind the unreality. But why does not the painter revert to the childhood of Vulcan, when he was hiding in the glistening cavern beneath the roll of ocean, fashioning resplendent eardrops for silver-footed Thetis? Here is scope for the imagination--to indicate the fancies of the budding genius who was to carve the wondrous shield, and adorn the heaven-domed halls of Olympus. Let Hephæstus mature as he will for the poet: he should only bloom for the painter.