There is a magic that touches wine, envelops its essence in the most precious glass, and that is its profoundly symbolic value. Wine is the joint fruit of human wisdom and natural forces, a universal symbol, a collective expression of the sacred and the profane, of work and pleasure, of reason and of the senses, of the most dynamic of substances and of the most diverse metamorphoses.
In a word, wine is art. It is therefore not surprising that art, especially figurative art, has been inspired by it since ancient times.The earliest testimonies are in Egypt around the 4th century BC that the vine had sacred and healing values. Egyptian art often depicted scenes of harvest and winemaking on the walls of pharaohs’ tombs.
However, wine was first and foremost destined to become a symbol of Western culture. Greek clay art (900/700 BC) already describes the use of two-handled jars, vases and amphorae at banquets in connection with drinking wine. Many of these scenes are about celebration and the joy of living together. But it is precisely because of the sacred value the Greeks ascribed to it that it acquires a richer symbolism. Dionysus (later Bacchus to the Romans) was the god of wine, drunkenness and pleasure, an expression of pleasure and sensual freedom in classical iconography.
The advent of Christianity will change everything. Medieval, small portrait of a Benedictine abbey, echoing the principles of the monastic law “Ora et Labora (Prayer and Work)”, bringing the working scene of the vineyard back to the human center, and its noble work, which makes it even more Get closer to God.
At the same time, wine has also become a symbol of secular fatigue and a symbol of Christian salvation, known as the “blood of Jesus”.
In one of the most famous paintings of all time, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1494), Jesus proclaims the most important sentence of the Christian liturgy before his apostles, declaring the consecration of bread and wine as “Christ’s body and blood”. The wine on the table already has a sacred connotation here.
The Renaissance would reawaken the echoes of classicism, associated with the hedonistic pleasures of wine, which delighted noble courts. One of the most important works of this period is the famous Caravaggio’s Bacchus (1596), which is a wonderful combination of classical imagination and Christian influence.
Bacchus, god of wine, with a crown woven of grape leaves on his head, is young and lustful: his cheeks are red with drunkenness, and his hands tremble with the cup. Bacchus holds a tassel knot in his hand, symbolizing the union of God and man. This expression is somewhere between sarcasm and a little drunk, and the deliberate pose almost broke me. Some people think that Caravaggio wanted to make fun of the classical tradition of the Renaissance. A friend pretended to be a model and posed like this under the influence of alcohol. On the other hand, this is not uncommon in the eyes of the painter, an industrious adventurer in taverns and inns. It sets out to imagine a pictorial realism in which wine is perfectly immersed in the everyday life of time and expressed in its most human functions.
For example, we observe The Drunkard (1629) (also known as the Triumph of Bacchus) by the Spanish painter Velazquez. Here we also find a young Bacchus with a grape-leaf headband, but the classical echoes have completely disappeared. Velazquez’s Bacchus is sitting on a barrel, his home is Osteria, and his followers are peasants overwhelmed by the toils of the earth, whose toils the wine drives away by turning their cheeks red. Everything is very personal.
In this new, everyday-focused style of writing, it’s interesting to note the role wine plays in relationships, especially love. In “Wineglass” by the Dutch painter Vermeer (1660), there is a man and a woman. He was waiting for the lady to finish her glass and prepare to refill it. She was wearing a hat and peering into the glass, out of his sight. Women are shy and humble, men are direct and purposeful, with an alluring attitude. The wine represents both, he in the jug of the glass ready to be filled, she in the restraint of the empty glass trying to resist new temptations.
With the development of a new center of naturalism in the eighteenth century, the harvest of the grapes became the protagonist of many works of the period.
In Goya’s The Autumn (1786), a young nobleman, sitting on a wall, presents a cluster of grapes to a woman of his rank, while a child tries to grab him. Behind the wall is a folk girl with a large basket of grapes on her head. It is not only an elegant fragment of a happy life, but also a perfect synthesis of class differences, highlighting the hard work of the people in harvesting and the joy of the rich in harvesting.
A century later, Vincent van Gogh’s The Red Vines (1888), elevated grape harvesting to an inspiring subject. Nature is no longer dominant, and the expression of paintings is mixed with more elemental expressions. In the center of the scene, a vision gives color (the saturated crimson of the vineyards, the blue of the workers, the warm yellow of the sky) the task of revealing itself.
We are at the height of Impressionism, the painting trend that made color the true protagonist of the canvas, leaving its perspective to the emotion of the viewer rather than the artist’s “impression”, who often painted outdoors. In the famous Renoir painting “Breakfast of the Boaters” (1880), wine helps to create an atmosphere of extreme naturalness given by the expressions and movements of the convivial companions, a symbol of conviviality and festive joy.
Realism also infiltrated Manet’s famous painting “The Bar of Frisberger” (1882), in which an absent-minded waitress leans on a bar, beautifully displaying bottles of wine and champagne, the latter in the Very popular among the VIPs of Paris at the time.
From now on, it will be the bottle that marks the art of wine painting. In Cézanne’s “The Drinker” (1891), the protagonist in the painting is lonely, contemplative and deep. In the painting, a person who cannot see the light seems to be dehumanized, but it contrasts with the clarity of the wine bottle and the fruit on the table.
In Cézanne’s “The Drinker” (1891), the protagonist in the painting is lonely, contemplative and deep. In the painting, a person who cannot see the light seems to be dehumanized, but it contrasts with the clarity of the wine bottle and the fruit on the table.
Same subject, but different background, “The Second Day” (1895), painted for Munk, shows a woman lying motionless on a bed, apparently in a state of intoxication, her arms dangling. First, the two bottles of wine on the nightstand remind you of the previous day’s drunkenness, presumably a sign of a fleeting night of passion, and the next day, it’s really gone. With sharp irony, Monchi subverts the classic “bed nude” portraiture, taking the elegant paintings of the time as his subject. In addition to the messy and de-sensual gesture, the wine bottle is given the task of profane, artificial, twisting its meaning.
The step from sleeping to dreaming is short. When we arrived in the 90s, painting more and more often studies the human heart, beyond the performance on the canvas. The irrational and the unconscious triumph over rationality and appear as abstractions. Surrealism was born. The Wine Bottle (1924) by the French painter Joan Miró is a good example. The bottle in the foreground is the only concrete element, and in the background insects and other zoomorphic elements revolve around it. The label with the letters “VI” recalls the ambiguity of the meanings of “Vin” (wine) and “vie” (life), perfectly expressing the fusion of art and life, a pillar of the Surrealist manifesto.
A year later, Picasso would also paint his Wine Bottle (1925) in cubism. True reality is represented again, but in a reconstituted pictorial space, decomposed form multiplying perspectives. The bottle is unrecognizable except for the writing ‘vin’, and the viewer is tasked with reconstructing the shape and meaning in their minds.
The infinite symbol of wine will also touch the futuristic avant-garde, and in the full exaltation of progress, wine is considered one of the symbols of Italian excellence in the Fascist era. There’s a palpable optimism in Fortunato Depero’s “The Ceremony and Splendor of the Inn,” where stylized men jubilate in goblets.
Of course this is not the point. European art has and will continue to tell its story with a brush and wine. Intoxicating grapes, chalices, vines, cups of temptation, solitary decanters: endless metamorphoses into symbols of infinity. There are so many changes and contradictory movements in human nature.
