Charles Jencks, Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, Rizzoli, New York © 1987

…These intentional mixtures of time and place are not disturbing because of the overriding unities of mood and style. A lyrical celebration of the birth of wine – of strength, Eros, and the rebirth of nature – is convincingly portrayed in the gestures and glowing colours. One believes in the equation of sexual energy and nature’s renewal…Since most of us are unfamiliar wit the particulars of Dionysus’ early years, we may not realize that we was transformed into a ram, tended in a cave and disguised as a girl – events which are alluded to in the painting. Only when we cross these mythological texts with those of the 1960s and 1970s – stressing the wholeness of rural life – does this divergent signification become clearer so that we read the work as both a nostalgic pastoral and political polemic. This brings us to the most prevalent aspect of Post-Modernism, its double-coding, use of irony, ambiguity and contradiction.