The Winepress

Single-sheet prints were first produced from woodblocks in the early 1400s. Many of those that were made as individual artworks do not survive, and those in good condition were often preserved because they were pasted inside books. This woodcut print was glued to the inside front cover of a fifteenth-century breviary from a Franciscan monastery in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt.

By the second century Christians began to interpret the ‘crimsoned garments’ of Isaiah 63:1–3 (cf. Revelation 19:11–16) as a prophecy of Christ’s blood-stained body. Christ treads the winepress during his Passion, producing the Eucharistic cup. This reading took deep root in the literary and iconographic tradition of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and was depicted in a wide variety of media, including woodcuts, illuminated manuscripts, frescoes, stained glass, and even sculpted stone relief.

Glued into the breviary, this woodcut invites its user to contemplate Christ’s Passion and the Eucharist. As Christ treads the grapes, his blood drips down, mixing with the juice of the fruit and draining into a chalice. With his right arm wrapped around the winepress’s upper beam, Christ pulls the press down upon himself, as if to intensify his sufferings. With God the Father above him and Mary at his left, Christ points to his pierced side—the wound most associated with the Eucharist—as though to warn the viewer not to doubt as Thomas did (John 20:24–29).

The Evangelists surround Christ, depicted by their symbols (from the Prophet Ezekiel’s vision as recounted in Ezekiel 1; cf. Revelation 4:6–8): a man (Matthew), lion (Mark), ox (Luke), and eagle (John). St Matthew, in the lower right, dips his quill into the chalice, literally writing his Gospel with Christ’s blood and thereby emphasizing the unity of Scripture with the Word made flesh (verbum incarnatum and verbum scriptum). Cascading like a waterfall of words, seven banderoles present the figures’ prayers, in which the worshipper is invited to join.

References

Gertsman, Elina. 2013. ‘Multiple Impressions: Christ in the Winepress and the Semiotics of the Printed Image’, Art History, 36.2: 310–337

Gurewich, Vladimir. 1957. ‘Observations on the Iconography of the Wound in Christ’s Side, with Special Reference to Its Position’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 20.3/4: 358–362

Parshall, Peter and Rainer Schoch. 2005. Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public (New Haven: Yale University Press)

Wilken, Robert Louis (trans.) with Angela Russell Christman and Michael J. Hollerich. 2007. Isaiah: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators, The Church’s Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans)

Much Christian exegesis of Isaiah 63:1–14 has focused on Christ’s Passion and the Eucharist. However, interpreters have also recognized that the passage is equally about justice, for it depicts God as both liberator of the oppressed and punisher of oppressors. St Jerome highlighted this theme in his Commentary on Isaiah, imagining that the question ‘Who is this that comes from Edom?’ (Isaiah 63:1) was posed by the angels. Not knowing beforehand about the Passion (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:6–7), they were puzzled by Christ’s bloodied appearance. According to Jerome, Christ responds:

I am the one who speaks justice … I am he who has come to fight against evil powers, to proclaim freedom to the captives and liberate from prison those in chains [cf. Isaiah 61:1]. I have come to punish my adversaries and free the captives. (Wilken 2007: 492)

In 1861 the American abolitionist Julia Ward Howe emphasized this theme of justice in Battle Hymn of the Republic, which opens by alluding to Isaiah 63:3:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored…

Romuald Hazoumé’s La Bouche du Roi (French for ‘the Mouth of the King’) is named after the place in Benin whence enslaved Africans were shipped to the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It consists mainly of petrol (gasoline) cans, whose anthropomorphic spouts and handles suggest the anguished faces of captives, and which are arranged to suggest the plan of a slave ship. It renews the protest against injustice voiced by Howe’s poem, but also extends it, by drawing our attention to and denouncing all forms of exploitation and their vestiges: the legacy of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century slave trade, the enslavement of people even today, the plight of refugees, economic corruption, and environmental degradation. Indeed, Hazoumé’s use of petrol cans made of plastic subtly underscores how oppression of human beings and environmental exploitation are often intertwined.

References

Snyder, Edward D. 1951. ‘The Biblical Background of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”’, The New England Quarterly, 24.2: 231–238

Ward, Robert J. 1993. ‘Biblical Imagery in Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic”’, The Choral Journal, 34.5: 25–27

Wilken, Robert Louis (trans.) with Angela Russell Christman and Michael J. Hollerich. 2007. Isaiah: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators, The Church’s Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans)

In the sixteenth century, as Western Christianity began fracturing, Roman Catholic apologetics defended the doctrine of transubstantiation by elaborating on images of Christ in the winepress. A prime example, this window in St Étienne du Mont visually proclaims the unity of the consecrated wine of the Mass with Christ’s blood which it dubs ‘the nectar of life’.

Christ lies in the winepress, his blood flowing into it. Attached to the winepress’s screws, the cross crushes him. In the upper left, patriarchs of the Hebrew Bible tend ‘the vineyard of Jesus’. Below them, St Peter treads grapes in a barrel, his proximity to Christ’s head highlighting his role—and implicitly the Pope’s—as Vicar of Christ. Beneath Peter, a group carries a cask of the precious blood towards the four Doctors of the Church—Gregory the Great, Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine—who fill barrels with grapes and Christ’s blood. On the right, two monarchs assist a pope and cardinal in storing the consecrated wine. Above Christ, the four zoomorphic Evangelists pull a chariot laden with a wine cask towards the steps of a church where confessions are heard and the Eucharist is distributed.

Today, seeking to build bridges rather than to hurl anathemas, perhaps we can mine the Church’s tradition to discover new ways of viewing and reading this luminous window. In the fourth century, Ambrose of Milan (in The Holy Spirit) likened the Church herself to the mystical winepress. Similarly, Augustine exhorted his congregation to imitate Christ, ‘the first grape’, by stepping ‘into the winepress’ and being ‘ready for the pressing’ (Boulding 2001: 85). By portraying a Church gathered around Christ and extending through time and space, St Étienne’s mystical winepress encourages all Christians to become ‘ready for the pressing’ and to share the gospel with a weary world that thirsts for ‘the nectar of life’.

References

Ambrose of Milan. On the Holy Spirit. 1963. Theological and Dogmatic Works, Fathers of the Church, vol. 44, trans. by Roy J. Deferrari (Washington: Catholic University of American Press)

Boulding, Maria (trans.). 2001. Exposition of Psalm 55, in The Works of St Augustine: Expositions of the Psalms, vol. III/17, ed. by John E. Rotelle (New York: New City Press), pp. 81–102

Mâle, Emile. 1986. Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Iconography and its Sources, trans. by Marthiel Mathews (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

Thomas, Alois. 1981. Die Darstellung Christi in der Kelter (Düsseldorf: Schwann)