Bacchanal with a Wine Vat
c. 1470
Medium
Engraving on cream laid paper
Dimensions
31.2 × 45 cm (12 5/16 × 17 3/4 in.)
Classification
engraving
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
4281
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Andrea Mantegna was an artist with a deep interest in antiquity, and much of his work resembled Greco-Roman sculpture, which he translated into widely circulating and frequently copied engravings. This is the left half of a pair of prints; the adjoining print Bacchanal with Silenos (1956.1010) is also in the Art Institute’s collection. Mantegna’s frieze-shaped bacchanalian subjects portray the god of wine and his drunken revelers. Dionysos may be the standing youth on the left, who is being crow...
About the Artist
Andrea Mantegna · 1431–1506
Andrea Mantegna was born around 1431 near Padua, in the Venetian Republic, the son of a carpenter. At approximately age eleven he was taken into the workshop of the Paduan painter and antiquities collector Francesco Squarcione, who enrolled him as a guild member and immersed him in the study of Roman sculpture and classical Latin. Though Mantegna later claimed that Squarcione had exploited his lab...