Alfonso d'Este first tried to fill his camerino with work by Fra Bartolommeo and then Raphael, but Raphael died in 1520 having left only a preliminary drawing^[1]. The commission passed to Titian, then the emerging star of Venetian painting, who worked from Philostratus, Catullus and probably Ovid for the cycle's three main subjects: Bacchus and Ariadne, The Worship of Venus and The Bacchanal of the Andrians^[1]. The room also held Giovanni Bellini's Feast of the Gods, later reworked in places, a further Bacchanal attributed to Dosso Dossi, and a run of antique-style reliefs by Antonio Lombardo along the walls^[2]. Alfonso, by his own account first and foremost a soldier, used the commission to display a scholar's grasp of classical literature at a court that took its cue from his sister Isabella d'Este's studiolo in Mantua^[7].

Titian's subject comes directly from Philostratus the Elder's Imagines, a set of prose descriptions of paintings that may never have existed as physical works. Philostratus wrote of Andros as an island so charged with wine by the god's favour that its earth burst open and sent up a river, not of water but of wine, for the islanders to drink as they revelled^[1]. Titian populated the shore with the resulting company: couples embracing, a woman dancing, drinkers passed out or still reaching for the cup, and a small reclining figure of the river god lying on a couch of grape clusters near the wine's source^[6]. When Nicolas Poussin painted his own version of the same subject a century later, he followed Philostratus more literally than Titian had, giving the river god a far more prominent place in the composition and attending him with youths bearing a sacred goat and a libation^[6].

Titian's studio practice in these years, as later described by his pupil Palma Giovane, began with a base laid in with a brush loaded with colour, blocking in the promise of a figure in a few strokes before the canvas was turned to the wall and left, sometimes for months^[5]. Returning to it, Titian would treat the picture like a surgeon treating a patient, adjusting proportions and correcting a misplaced limb without concern for how much rework it cost him, building the final surface in many thin, glazed layers over that first coloured sketch^[5]. The result, across his paintings of this period, is a surface that changes character at different distances: dry, scrubbed passages sit beside heavily worked glazes, and the weave of the canvas itself is left to show through in places^[1].