Bacchanal with a Wine Vat

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

Andrea Mantegna was among the first artists in Italy to produce engravings. His scene of a bacchanalia, a wine-fueled festival of ancient Rome, is composed as if on a shallow stage, attesting to Mantegna’s interest in relief-carved Roman sarcophagi (stone coffins). Standing with his horn of plenty, Bacchus is in control of his senses. The mortals around him falter from too much drink. When Mantegna began making engravings in the 1470s, he was among the first to use the technique to reproduce drawings. Many of Mantegna’s engravings show printing imperfections, the result of a shallowly carved printing plate and ink that did not adhere evenly to the paper. Philosophers and moralists cautioned against drinking straight from the vat, because, as Bacchus's exalted pose suggests, only a god could handle such an intoxicating drink. Mere mortals usually mixed their wine with water until the 1800s.