It should come as no surprise that wine has been a worldwide source of artistic inspiration for millennia. It’s there in ancient Egyptian tombs. In Islamic works as a metaphor for both the divine and the debased. In dramatic depictions of class struggle in Central and South Asian art. In the religious art of the Americas post-Conquest, and anywhere else wine has been produced or consumed.
It plays an especially prominent role in European painting from the late Renaissance forward, when a desire to represent human emotion and everyday life intersected with wine’s increased consumption and production for non-religious reasons.
Here are some that we love and inspire us to crack open a bottle.
Image Courtesy of Museo Del Prado Bacchanal of the Andrians by Tiziano Vecelli (Titian) (1523)
Of all the wine-soaked paintings of bacchanals through the centuries, this might be the most famous, and most imitated. (It was actually copied by such artists as Pieter Paul Rubens and Diego Velázquez, among many others.) The scene is downright debauched, a celebration of wine and merriment, with a hoisted decanter at dead center. A tiny musical scroll reads, translated from French, “He who drinks and doesn’t drink again doesn’t know what drinking is.”
Image Courtesy of Uffizi Gallery Bacchus by Caravaggio (c. 1596)
Bacchus has never been depicted so seductively as in Caravaggio’s androgynous rosy-cheeked boy with killer biceps and a robe he can barely keep draped shut. He offers the observer wine from a capacious saucer-shaped glass,
This Article was originally published on Wine Enthusiast
