page_title: Feast of the Gods (art)
section_title: Italian Renaissance
hierarchical_section_title: Feast of the Gods (art) / Italian Renaissance
context_page_description: The Feast of the Gods or Banquet of the Gods as a subject in art showing a group of deities at table has a long history going back into antiquity. Showing Greco-Roman deities, it enjoyed a revival in popularity in the Italian Renaissance, and then in the Low Countries during the 16th century, when it was popular with Northern Mannerist painters, at least partly as an opportunity to show copious amounts of nudity.
  Often the occasion shown was specifically either the wedding of Cupid and Psyche or that of Peleus and Thetis, but other works show other occasions, especially the Feast of Bacchus, or a generalized feast. While the wedding of Cupid and Psyche is just the happy ending of Psyche's story, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis is part of the grand narrative of Greek mythology. The feast was interrupted by Eris, goddess of discord, who threw the golden Apple of Discord inscribed "for the most beautiful" into the company, provoking the argument that led to the Judgement of Paris, and ultimately to the Trojan War.
context_section_description: One of the earliest depictions is a cassone panel  by Bartolomeo di Giovanni from the 1490s (Louvre, illustrated); this is paired with a panel of the Procession of Thetis, another common way of depicting a wedding; artists were unsure what form an actual Olympian wedding ceremony might have taken.  A more sophisticated but similar depiction of a rustic picnic eaten on the ground, is The Feast of the Gods by Giovanni Bellini (1514), later changed by Titian (to 1529), a large and important painting; both show the story of Priapus and Lotis.
  Two major frescos from the end of the High Renaissance showed the wedding banquet of Cupid and Psyche: Raphael's central panel in the "Loggia of Psyche" at the Villa Farnesina in Rome, and Giulio Romano's wall panel in the Palazzo Te in Mantua.  Both of these became very well-known through print versions, often freely adapting the compositions, and inspired a wide range of versions in drawings and media of the decorative arts such as majolica, painted Limoges enamel and pastiglia.  Giulio's version seems to show the preparations rather than the feast itself, and only a few of the invited gods have so far arrived. But it is highly atmospheric and its dispersal of the figures across a large setting was to recur in many later depictions.  Both frescos showed a good proportion of the participants nude, or almost so, reflecting the practice of recent decades in mythological paintings. The Fête champêtre of Titian (or Giorgione) may represent a mythological subject, if not a feast then at least a picnic of the gods.
  Around the mid-century Taddeo Zuccari did the Wedding of Bacchus and Ariadne in fresco in the Villa Giulia, Rome, and in northern Europe Francesco Primaticcio painted that of Peleus and Thetis in a mythological series in the ballroom of the Palace of Fontainebleau. Frans Floris painted a monumental feast in oil (c. 1550, Antwerp), nearly two metres across, as well as a Feast of the Seagods (1561, Stockholm).
caption: The Feast of the Gods, Giovanni Bellini and Titian (1514–1529), also with Priapus and Lotis, also bottom right
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