For the 2005 Art-&-Vin group exhibition, the Faulkners at Domaine Grand Cros, Carnoules, chose the theme 'Grapes'.   I responded by taking the two father-figures of viticulture, Christian and Pagan, namely Noah and Dionysus. 

For Noah, I simply imagined him snoring-drunk, having fallen in his vat of unpressed grapes.  For Dionysus, who as a horned god with hair of snakes had been torn apart as a youth, to be reborn from the thigh of Zeus, I rewrote the myth (as one does) and have shown him being trampled to death in a vat of grapes; his rebirth was traditionally signalled by the presence of ivy and pomegranate as well as wine, and so it is here.

above: Andrea Pisano: The Drunkenness of Noah; 1336-43; Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence

and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: Young Bacchus; 1598; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Noah, or Adam Reborn...

In the well-known episode in Genesis, Noah - his name means 'rest' - was found drunk and having revealed himself; one theological tradition sees him as a sort of second Adam (from whom he was tenth in Seth's line) and thus his drunkenness is an echo of original sin and his vineyard a shadow of the Garden of Eden.  For this reason I have given his garden two trees, as of Life and of Knowledge.  

The entire narration of the Flood typifies the desire of the Lord to cleanse fallen man and the survival of the Ark thus typifies the redemption of animal and human kingdom.  Noah was seen as Man's hope after the Fall, the second head of Man and one of the most strenuous begetters in the Bible; with his subsequent drunken misbehaviour Man once again earned God's impatience, and though Noah himself was spared chastisement there was a messy saga of hatered and vengeance amongst his sons Canaan and Ham.  The Lord's renewed covenant with Man is represented here by the rainbow (and we see the flood rains subside yonder too) and in the stubbly vines are hidden the Hebrew text of Noah's drunkenness.  [Genesis IX, xx & xxi]

...and the Re-Birth of Dionysus

The usually hallucinogenic cult of Dionysus took many patterns in different regions.  Moreover, for the philosopher Nietzsche he stood as an ironic parallel figure to Christ, with whom he shares symbols such as the pomegranate and the importance of his rebirth.  His ritual death was at the orders of Hera, the jealous and angry tempered wife of Zeus, and much of the history of Dionysus involves the often controversial spread of wine as the chief ritual intoxicant, at the expense of beer, ivy leaves and mushrooms. 

Somewhere in the back of my mind I have had a sort of Caravaggio youth in mind, partly because of the generally gory nature of the scene but also because in his famous depiction of young Bacchus he rightly gives the god an effeminite youthfulness since, following Cretan tradition, he had been brought up as a girl.  (His name means 'lame-god'.)  The blue waters of Crete make a background to remind us that the fact of wine, the word for wine and the cult of wine all derive from there...

Just to peek past the curtains of endless interweavings and overlappings, you may care to note that the Flood of Deucalion, brought on by Zeus, is a myth with many parallels to that of Noah; as we'd expect.  It was the Greeks, however, who sought to shift the credit for the invention of wine away from its more remote, eastern origins with Deucalion, and to insist upon the Cretan myth of Dionysus.  Deucalion - his name means 'new-wine-sailor' - was the brother of Ariadne, she who was to become the beloved wife of Dionysus.....