The other Saint Bacchus

Designer: William Burges, 1827-1881
Painter: Nathaniel Hubert John Westlake, 1833-1921
Maker: Harland & Fisher
England, London

Sideboard and Wine Cabinet, 1859

Pine and mahogany, painted and gilded; iron straps; metal mounts
126.5 x 157 x 58 cm (49 3/4 x 61 3/4 x 22 3/4 in.)

In the European Decorative Arts gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago is a wine side board, a cabinet for storing wine and wine accessories done in the latest fashion. The 19th century witnessed a trendy taste for the gothic. Artists and writers turned towards the middle ages and incorporated window tracery, stained glass, gargoyles and romance characters like Tristan and Isolde into their homes, theatres and galleries.

The artists here, Nathaniel Hubert and John Westlake, looked to medieval manuscript illumination and its brightly colored, flat and graphic style to add a stroke of the past to this cabinet. As if taken directly from a manuscript, richly ornamented architectural designs frame scenes from the life of Saint Bacchus. Something we might expect to see in an illustrated haigiography, or written account of the life of a saint, from the middle ages. In the first two scenes we see followers venerating the saint. They bring him alms, kiss his hands and sing his praises. In the next scene we see the martyrdom of Saint Bacchus. He encounters a band of ill-meaning folk who shove him into a wine casket. His story ends with a perhaps unassuming man taps the casket for a glass of wine and instead of drawing wine, draws the blood of the saint.



Seemingly appropriate subject matter, and tempering as well, for a wine cabinet save for one small problem. This was not the life of Saint Bacchus! Saint Bacchus was a third century military saint, an officer in the Roman army who refused to enter a Roman temple and pay homage to Jupiter. He, along with his companion Sergius, were chastised by being paraded around town in womens clothing (I imagine something from Monty Python's Flying Circus) and eventually executed. Together, St. Sergius and St. Bacchus were highly venerated saints particularly in Byzantium where a church still stands next to the train tracks along the sea in Instanbul (now called Kucuk Aya Sofya).

So it turns out that Misters Westlake and Hubert were a bit clever in their rending of the Saint's life. If that wasn't enough to give the to-be wino a hearty laugh maybe the cartouches, or roundels, around the second register might. We have the portraits of several noble-looking folk, perhaps knights and ladies. The artists did their homework and rendered these chivaric faces against red and blue backgrounds and labeled them with abbreviated lettering as one finds in latin and greek medieval inscriptions. Sounding them out, we find that not only are they in English but they bear familiar names: PORT, SHRY, BRGNDY or rather port, sherry, burgundy the names of wines one might hope to find in the cabinet. If that isn't clever enough, the artists paired the color of the hair to the darkness of the wine they represented.

Its an extremely fun and unusual object indeed. It featured in the 1862 International Exhibition in London was was presumed to be lost for quite some time. It now rests next to a model chalice by the neo-gothic proponent, Pugin.