Fun at the Wedding

Giovanni Bellini's Feast of the Gods has long been a puzzle as well as a masterpiece. The gods look more drunk than divine. Vesta, protector of virgins, lies dozing in one corner of the picture while Priapus fiddles with her skirt. A blowsy Ceres helps Apollo hoist cup to lip. Neptune is paired off with Gaea, who holds a quince --the symbol of marriage. Bacchus appears as a child, and his foster father Silenus looks more like a slender ascetic than a roly-poly satyr. Generations of art scholars have wondered why.

Smith College Professor Edgar Wind thinks he has found the answer. In a recently published book (Bellini's Feast of the Gods, Harvard University, $7.50), he argues that the key to the riddle is Gaea's symbolic quince. The Feast, he says, is really a wedding party; Gaea is Lucrezia Borgia; Neptune is her husband, Alfonso d'Este, who commissioned the painting.

From contemporary portraits and medallions, Wind has identified Mercury as Alfonso's brother Ippolito, Silenus as Pietro Bembo (who later became a cardinal), Silvanus as Painter Bellini himself. Since the Feast was finished several years after the wedding, Alfonso's son Ercole might have played the barrel-tapping little Bacchus.

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