In a famous wine painting, the wine almost never just sits in a glass. Somebody makes it, pours it, offers it, gulps it down or pays for it the next morning. The same red liquid can mark a toast, a seduction, a sacrament or a disgrace.
Eleven paintings and one painted cup follow, from an Egyptian grape harvest to Caravaggio's Bacchus, Vermeer's The Glass of Wine and Veronese's Wedding at Cana, and each gives the wine its own job.
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How These Were Chosen
A work made the list when its wine, or the vessel that holds it, has a specific job in the scene, and when a museum catalog or a historian's study describes that job. A glass left on a table, however well painted, did not count.
12. Unknown Theban Painter, The Vintage in the Tomb of Nakht (about 1410 to 1370 BC)
Two men pick grapes under a vine that bends over them like an arch. Right beside them, two others tread the harvest in a vat, crushing the grapes underfoot.
This grape harvest is a wall painting from the tomb chapel of Nakht, a scribe and a priest who served Amun, the chief god of Thebes. It was made sometime between 1410 and 1370 BC, and the exact year is not known.
Thebes, in Upper Egypt, is today's Luxor. Nakht's tomb lies on the west bank of the Nile, where the city buried its dead, and the harvest is painted low on the west wall of his chapel, beside a scene of hunting birds in the marshes.
The image here is a full-scale copy on paper. The English Egyptologist Norman de Garis Davies painted it with his team between 1908 and 1914 for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and published the tomb in 1917. The original wall is still in the tomb.
Read from the vine to the jars, the wall shows wine being made step by step. The pickers fill their baskets, and the grapes go into the vat, which the painter shows from the side, as Egyptian painters usually did.
Inside the vat, the treaders hold on to straps that hang from a beam, so they do not sink too deep into the pulp. The juice runs out through a spout into a small basin below, where a man crouches to collect it.
Above the vat, the painter set the last step. There four tall red jars stand already full, closed with gray clay stoppers, and each one carries two black marks.
Those marks are seals. They recorded where the wine came from and how good it was, what a label on a bottle still records today: a place and a grade.
The harvest is only one part of the wall. In the same band of painting, Nakht and his wife, Tawi, sit in a light shelter and look at the riches of the papyrus marshes, with grapes and pomegranates among their provisions.
Painters of other Theban tombs used the same models for these harvest and hunting scenes. In a tomb they had a purpose: the food and wine painted around Nakht and Tawi were meant to supply the couple in the afterlife.
At a Glance
Artist: Unknown painter of the Theban tombs (original). Copy by Norman de Garis Davies and his team
Painted: About 1410 to 1370 BC, 18th Dynasty (original). 1908 to 1914 (copy)
Medium: Wall painting (original). Tempera on paper, at full scale (copy)
Where to see it: Tomb of Nakht (TT 52), Thebes, modern Luxor (original). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gallery 135 (copy)
About This Painting
Is the Nakht vintage at the Met the original?
No. The Met's Nakht vintage is a facsimile painted by Norman de Garis Davies, Lancelot Crane, Francis Sydney Unwin and Hugh R. Hopgood, and bought by the museum in 1915. The wall itself never left the tomb.
When was the tomb of Nakht discovered?
The tomb of Nakht was cleared in 1889 by the French Egyptologist Eugène Grébaut, who had it fitted with a wooden door. Davies thought local villagers had found it shortly before.
What else came out of the tomb of Nakht?
A statuette of Nakht was found at the bottom of a shaft on the first day of clearing.
11. Exekias, The Dionysus Cup (about 540 to 530 BC)
A god lies stretched out in a small sailing ship, and a vine climbs out of the mast above him, heavy with bunches of grapes. Seven dolphins swim around the hull.
The scene is painted inside a Greek drinking cup, a kylix, which is a wide, shallow bowl on a foot, with two handles. It was made in Athens about 540 to 530 BC, and Exekias signed it as its potter, the man who shaped the clay.
The round picture covers the floor of the bowl, so it lay under the wine whenever the cup was full. And the creatures around the ship, in the story it tells, had not always swum in the sea.