?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
ANDREA MANTEGNA Bacchanal with a Wine Vat.
Engraving, 1498. 313x447 mm; 12 3/8x17 1/2 inches. Trimmed on or just inside the plate mark, with the enitre subject preserved. A very good impression of this extremely scarce, early Italian engraving. We have found fewer than 10 other impressions at auction in the past 30 years.
This is one of four engravings of mythological scenes by the famous Renaissance painter Mantegna (1431-1506) that date from the late 1400s and forms a sort of pendant with his Bacchanal with Silenus, engraving, though the two scenes were not concieved as a single composition like The Battle of the Sea Gods, engraving, circa 1485-88.
Mantegna's Bacchanal with a Wine Vat was a highly-influential image in its day and thereafter. Dürer copied the figures of Bacchus in one of his early drawings now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, and he incorporated a variety of the nude figures in his engravings and woodcuts. Leonardo da Vinci made use of the figure of Bacchus and the figure to his left in several drawings now in the British Royal Collection, London. Another of Mantegna's figures was drawn by Peter Paul Rubens in his Nude Youth and a Horn of Plenty now in the collection of the Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Bartsch 9; Hind 4.
