Art and alcohol—they've always been boisterous companions.
Painters and sculptors have been chasing inspiration
by getting wasted for centuries.
But this isn't a series tracing the raucous history of artists who love booze.
This is a fleeting vision of art history glimpsed, if you like,
through the bottom of a glass squiffly.
I'm going to pick eight masterpieces that span the full scope of Western art,
each of which takes drinking as its principle subject or theme.
In this episode, we're exploring the debate and debauchery
of an ancient Greek symposium with archaeologist Dr. Alexandra Sofroniew
of St. John's College Oxford at the Ashmolean Museum.
What happened at the symposium aside clearly from the drinking?
Well, as you said it was only men invited,
and they gathered in a room—a special room at the house called the andron,
where there were couches laid out and small tables with food.
Initially it seems like participants were reading poetry
and enjoying music and even talking about philosophy,
but as the night wore on they were drinking more and more,
and you just see a lot of playfulness and fun and jokes in these vessels.
The thing that really puzzles me though is that central grotesque, bearded Gorgon face.
What is that doing in the middle of this thing?
Right, well that's the joke—the joke played on the drinker.
So when they finally finished all of their wine,
they're staring right into the face of the grotesque Gorgon,
and it's to ward off the evil eye. But this cup has an additional surprise.
While you're drinking this huge cup, you yourself are about to be confronted with the Gorgon's head.
You are of course raising it. As you're doing that, you're revealing the back of the cup
to the other participants of the symposium,
and the joke's on them.
Yeah, that's quite unambiguous, isn't it?
So is this actually genuinely—I don't quite know how we can politely refer to this.
But this is—what do we call this? This is the foot of the cup.
Is it not? It's a euphemism really.
Exactly. It is the foot of the cup, but it's a very unusual foot.
And then this very handsome piece—this is a boar's head presumably.
So isn't that—is the joke there that the more you drink,
the more your sort of bestial side comes to the full?
Exactly. So this is a drinking horn, a right urn. It came from the near East
where there were commonly examples made of silver.
And this is a terracotta version, a Greek version.
And in some cases, they would have had a hole at the bottom
so you can't put it down, and actually you have to drink quite quickly
because the liquid is flowing out.
So this was the sort of ancient Greek equivalent of a shot glass.
Yes. >> Far bigger. >> Exactly.
But it has on it a scene of a symposium itself,
so again there's a man and a woman reclining.
And she doesn't have any clothes on her top half.
No, they're having a very jolly time.
I see. So the whole tone of this symposium,
it seems to me quite double-edged because on the one hand
it sounds quite high-minded, discussions of politics and philosophy.
But then it could also be very bawdy.
It's interesting that they do span several hundred years
because it suggests the strength of Greek culture,
and not just the famous Greek things we know about like the invention of democracy.
Yes indeed, the Greeks exported the practice of making and drinking wine
very successfully around the Mediterranean.
