Silenus, Bacchus’s tutor, stands at the centre of the bacchanalian retinue. His stumbling gait reveals his drunkenness and debauchery as does the suckling Paniskin on the left and the copulating goats on the right. The present composition was not planned in this form from the outset, but is the result of Rubens’s reworking during the mid-1620s, when the painting—that originally only depicted the drunken Silenus—was enlarged. The loose brushwork, with which certain details are merely suggested, derives from Rubens’s close study of Titian.