Earlier in the week, I spotted this bottle of Pinot Grigio in the Marks and Spencer flagship store at Marble Arch. The painting on the label is Caravaggio’s The Musicians (1595.)
Three students of music are caught off-guard as they tune their instruments, consult their sheet music and generally limber up for a performance. Cupid makes this trio a quartet. He fusses with a bunch of grapes, giving them a prune before they're still-life ready. If music be the food of love, play on.
Three students of music are caught off-guard as they tune their instruments, consult their sheet music and generally limber up for a performance. Cupid makes this trio a quartet. He fusses with a bunch of grapes, giving them a prune before they're still-life ready. If music be the food of love, play on.
It's a great image for a bottle of wine. Cupid’s grapes are a small, but vital, detail. The painting says: company, love, music, and art, these are the important things in life, but a glass of wine is a fine addition.
If you were being pedantic you might say that a Garganega wine from the Veneto would have been better illustrated by a Venetian artist. A nice Bacchus by Titian, maybe? But I like the contrast between a refined and rarefied northern wine and a hot-blooded southern painter. At Tesco and Sainsbury’s you can get a Garganega wine with a Canaletto on the label: a clean, bright white wine married with an immaculate and exacting Venetian artist.
Alas, the civilising M&S mission has stopped at one bottle of white wine. There is as yet no Rembrandt roast beef, no Salvador Dali Lobster Thermidor, and no Damien Hirst shark fin soup.
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