In Vino Veritas

The origin of wine predates written records. To ancient winemaking cultures, including the Greeks, Romans, Anatolians, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and early Jews and Christians, wine had divine origins. In the Greek Odyssey (c. 700s BCE), Homer describes wine as “descended from the bless’d abodes / A rill of nectar, streaming from the gods.” This nectar of the gods carried transformational properties. It had the ability to inspire spiritual insight but also to raise spirits, stir conviviality, and nurture love. 

Roman author Pliny the Elder (23/24–79 CE) quoted the proverb “in vino veritas” (in wine, truth), the maxim that inspires the title of this fall’s exhibition in the James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Galleries. In Vino Veritas (In Wine, Truth) explores wine’s role in European art during the early modern period (c. 1500–1800) through a variety of prints, drawings, textiles, paintings, and decorative arts primarily from the museum’s collection. 

During the Renaissance, wine’s significance shifted from a dietary and sacred to a cultural, even aesthetic, choice. Much of this had to do with Renaissance culture’s reflection on the ancients. In Greco-Roman religion, Bacchus was a nature god with the power to create ecstasy, fueled by wine. Images of Bacchus and his followers, or bacchantes—male satyrs, female maenads, and other woodland creatures—appear on Roman sarcophagi and other ancient monuments, which inspired a revival of interest in the subject matter around 1500. Renaissance thinkers were drawn to Bacchus’s dual nature: On the one hand, overindulgence in the god’s divine nectar corrupted the mind and body, but on the other, it held the opportunity for spiritual and creative insight. In Pliny’s words, one should drink “just enough.” The tension between wine’s benefits and perils greatly interested Renaissance philosophers, poets, and artists. 

Jusepe de Ribera’s etching Silenus captures the late-Renaissance relationship to wine as both a mechanism of mundane pleasure and an allegory of the human condition. Wise Silenus was Bacchus’s teacher, educating his charge on wine’s pleasures and its accompanying revelries. Silenus reclines on the ground almost nude, a wine leaf covering his genitals in a comical attempt at modesty. With lidded eyes and an open mouth, he is encumbered by the weight of his body yet able to control his arm to receive another cupful from a satyr. He barely notices that the god Pan crowns him with grapevines. At right, two children mimic Silenus’s behavior, but given their inexperience, they cannot hold their drink. The braying donkey, entering from the side, adds to the cacophonous hilarity of the scene. De Ribera’s Silenus surrenders completely to his senses, his great wisdom rendered impotent by overindulgence. The print bears a dedication to a Sicilian nobleman, a sign of respect that may indicate the dedicatee’s discerning taste in wine, or his love of revelry. 

If wine provided Silenus unabashed pleasure, it was more problematic for the everyday citizen. Abraham Bosse’s print Autumn depicts a group of French bourgeois (middle class) city dwellers wearing clothing contemporary to Bosse’s time. These urbanites turn a timeless agrarian grape harvest into a boisterous bacchanalia, overturning a table, drawing swords, and tussling in the shadows. The verses below the print make clear that the revelers have offended Bacchus himself, enjoying the “new wine,” while “still boiling, and without water” (since wine, drunk properly, was always mixed with water). Intended to be amusing, Bosse’s print was also a commentary on threats to civility in French society.

The works on view playfully uncork wine’s numerous, sometimes conflicting, always entertaining intersections with human behavior. The exhibition also explores wine’s role in images made in religious contexts, as both a plot element and a symbol of sacrifice and freedom. Like wine itself, the artworks in In Vino Veritas amuse and delight, cultivating deeper connections to Europe’s early modern culture.