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Tom Nichols, Double Vision: The Ambivalent Imagery of Drunkenness in Early Modern Europe, Past & Present, Volume 222, Issue suppl_9, 2014, Pages 146–167, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtt033
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Extract
This essay explores two superficially opposed traditions showing drinking and drunkenness in visual art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Art history has long distinguished between an idealizing and narrative artistic tradition in Italy, and a realist or descriptive mode in northern countries such as Holland and Germany. 1 In accordance with this, it might be tempting to make a contrast between a classically inflected southern tradition, in which drinking is shown as socially and spiritually elevating, and a realist and satirical northern alternative, in which it is condemned as destructive and marginalizing. But the evidence suggests that visual depictions of drinking and drunkenness in this period were much more equivocal than this dichotomous model allows.
This ambiguity in visual imagery was, in part, a reflection of the unresolved or paradoxical status of social discourses on drinking in early modern Europe. Social historians have shown that hard drinking was understood as one means by which young men distinguished themselves from boys in seventeenth-century Holland, but also that it could be seen as unmanly or emasculating. In Germany, participation in drinking bouts likewise helped to enhance men’s social status, but it was also proscribed by the authorities, and was strictly forbidden to women. The pros and cons of the consumption of brandy and gin were the cause of widespread controversy, and wine drinking was the subject of similarly conflicting discourses in Italy, where it was promoted for medicinal purposes while also being condemned as the cause of social disruption. 2
