WINE, A NATURAL SUBJECT FOR NIÉPCE

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1. Although the ‘inventor’ of photography, Nicéphore Niépce only took two photographs himself. Some believe La Table servie to have been the first of these (1823-5); recently, however, it has been argued that the image may in fact have been his second work (1832-3). The plate was lost among the collections of the Société Française de Photographie at the start of the 20th century.

 

What could have been a more natural subject for Niépce’s still life than a table set with wine? Like many painters of the period, he photographed the things he saw around him. This is true of Point de vue du Gras (1927), a photograph taken from the window of his house in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, near Chalon-sur-Saône. Aside from the fact that drinking wine at the table was an everyday activity in the 19th century, it is worth remembering that Niépce came from Burgundy!

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WITH CIRCE, PRAMNIAN WINE BECOMES A WICKED POTION

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2. Julia Margaret Cameron is known for portraits of celebrities of her era. However, she also created photographic illustrations inspired by the English Pre-Raphaelites. She spent time with Dante Gabriel Rosetti, one of the founders of the movement. Pre-Raphaelite women tend to be represented either as redeeming angels or dangerous seductresses; their value in such paintings tends to be symbolic and rooted in Bible stories or mythology. This photograph is a study for a portrait of the goddess Circe (known to the Greeks as Demeter). The young girl has long, loose hair – a feature of many Pre-Raphaelite women. Nor is it rare for such female figures to be crowned with laurel leaves, flowers or stars. But why is Circe crowned with bunches of grapes here?

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The fruit is meant to remind the viewer of the episode in Homer’s Odyssey, where Circe offers a potion, laced with Pramnian* wine, to Ulysses’ shipmates; the drink transforms the crew into pigs, trapping them on the island of Aeaea: “She brought them in and made them sit on chairs and seats, and made for them a potion of cheese and barley meal and yellow honey with Pramnian wine; but in the food she mixed baneful drugs, that they might utterly forget their native land. Now when she had given them the potion, and they had drunk it off, then she presently smote them with her wand, and penned them in the sties. And they had the heads, and voice, and bristles, and shape of swine, but their minds remained unchanged even as before. So they were penned there weeping, and before them Circe flung mast and acorns, and the fruit of the cornel tree, to eat, such things as wallowing swine are wont to feed upon.” (The Odyssey, Book 10, ll. 230-43). Circe lives on a deserted island, in a forest of wild beasts who seem domesticated. These animals are, of course, men that she has transformed with the help of her wine-based potion. Thus she changes Ulysses’ crew into pigs when they arrive on her island. Eurylochus is the only one of the party to escape the spell.

 

Hermes had given Ulysses a magic plant – the holy ‘moly’ – which has black roots and milky white flowers. Ulysses uses the herb to resist Circe’s magic, then pulls out his sword; frightened, Circe invites the hero into her bed. Still mindful of Hermes’ warnings, Ulysses makes the witch swear ‘by the Gods’ not to harm him. This done, the pair unite and Circe undoes the spell, giving Ulysses’ shipmates back their human appearance. A year goes by before Circe helps the crew to leave the island, advising them to visit Tiresias in the Underworld.

 

We can add to these explanations, given in Homer’s original text, by noting that Pramnian wine is produced on the hillsides of the mountain of the same name, situated on the island of Icaria in the Aegean Sea, not far from Samos. It is here that Zeus is said to have ‘given birth’ to Dionysus, the ‘twice-born’ (see below). Circe also shared her bed with Bacchus/Dionysus, with whom she had a son, Cornus. The pairing of these two divinities seems quite natural: together, they symbolically ensure man’s survival, one of the pair providing staple foodstuffs and the other providing wine. This being the case, it is no surprise that Julia Margaret Cameron chose this particular hairstyle for her subject! 

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* Pramnian wine was “a rude, austere wine, black in the shade and purple in the light. Hippocrates recommended it for hemorrhages” (Charles-Joseph Panckoucke).

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DIONYSUS, THE ‘TWICE-BORN’

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3. Iconography dealing directly with the ‘second birth’ of Dionysus is very limited. Dionysus is the only god to be born of a mortal mother: according to Homer, he is the son of Zeuz and Semele, the daughter of Cadmos, King of Thebes, and Harmonia. Zeus was the lover of Semele for so long that, of her own initiative or persuaded by a jealous Hera, the princess wished to see him as a god – as his lover, the pregnant Semele only ever saw Zeus in the dark.

 

Zeus, who had promised to carry out her wish, was forced to reveal himself. Struck by his lightning, Semele died on the spot. Zeus removed the baby from her womb, sewing it into his thigh – centre of life-force in Indo-European culture – until Dionysus came to term, ‘born from the thigh of Jupiter’. Dionysus (‘the twice-born’) is therefore twice the son of Zeus in two ways. 

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BACCHUS OR CHRIST?

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4. This work of Caravaggio can be seen as a self-portrait of the artist as Bacchus/Christ, who is shown offering himself as a communion Eucharist – ‘Eucharist’ means ‘good flesh’ – to the libertine cardinals of Rome; he holds to his lips a bunch of golden, juicy grapes, in an admittedly sensual manner.

 

Crowned with ivy and dressed in an Antique-style toga which reveals a muscular shoulder, he holds the bunch of green grapes to his chest, seemingly wishing to squeeze the juice from the divine fruit. We can draw two conclusions from this: either that the Greek wine takes the guise of Eucharistic wine in order to bring ever more people to the feast; or that the wine of Christ transforms the bacchanalia into a kind of ‘universal Mass’.

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