Vintage and Winepress Scenes in Mosaics of Late Antiquity

Man's manifold activities in towns and cities, but mainly in the countryside, were among the most valued sources of inspiration for mosaicists in Late Antiquity. Scenes of the vintage and the winepress, relating to happy, carefree moments of everyday life, featured widely in the mosaic pavements of urban residences and country villas in the third and fourth centuries AD, as well as of ecclesiastical buildings later, in various parts of the Western and Eastern Mediterranean. However, the subject of the winepress appears more frequently in certain regions, pointing clearly to the importance of viticulture and wine production in these. Several examples are known from Northern Africa and Spain in the third and fourth centuries AD, white the winepress is one of the most popular subjects of the local mosaic workshops in the East, active in the provinces of ancient Palestine, Arabia and Phoenicia in the sixth century AD. Vintage and winepress representations in mosaic often combine realistic and fictitious elements: e.g. in many cases young putti carry out all the tasks that the vintage involves, such as picking the bunches of grapes, placing them in baskets, transporting them to the winepress and working the press. In most cases the depictions of the winepress and the collecting vat are realistic, at least regarding their principal features; however, there are also instances in which a tendency to abstraction is noted, more frequently in the latest examples. Of special interest is the representation of manually operated, single, fixed-screw presses in sixth century mosaics from the Eastern Empire, which complements and completes the knowledge gained from finds in excavations. The themes of the winepress and wine-pressers are closely related to Dionysiac iconography in a group of mosaics dating from the third to the early fifth century AD. These works, in which the wine-pressers are Pan or Satyrs, surely echo the uninterrupted relationship of Dionysos with the process of the wine production during Late Antiquity. (Résumé auteur)