page_title: Christ in the winepress
section_title: Relation to actual technology
hierarchical_section_title: Christ in the winepress / Relation to actual technology
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Christus in der Kelter, vom Epitaph Conrad Lemmer und Frau (1654), St.-Stephani-Kirche (Calbe) mit Gestalten des AT u. NT und Christus in der Kelter nach dem Titelkupfer der Ernestinischen Bibel (1649)
context_page_description: Christ in the winepress or the mystical winepress is a motif in Christian iconography showing Christ standing in a winepress, where Christ himself becomes the grapes in the press. It derives from the interpretation by Augustine and other early theologians of a group of passages in the Bible, and is found as a visual image in Christian art between about 1100 and the 18th century, as well as in religious literature of many kinds. The image in art underwent a number of changes of emphasis, while remaining fairly consistent in its basic visual content, and was one of the relatively few medieval metaphorical or allegorical devotional images to maintain a foothold in Protestant iconography after the Reformation.
context_section_description: The typical image from the late-medieval period onwards sacrifices a realistic treatment of winepress technology for the needs of an immediately recognisable visual metaphor, and one including a human figure in an unnatural place in the centre of the composition.  The place where Christ stands in most compositions would in reality be occupied by various pieces of the mechanism, in particular a plate or disk to press on the grapes, which would be in a smaller circular wooden "basket" like a straight-sided barrel, but with gaps between the staves to allow the juice to escape, and various bulky weights and spacing blocks of wood to transmit the pressure from the beam down to the plate.  Christ is nearly always shown standing in a shallow rectangular framework, which is realistic, but this is for collecting the juice flowing out of the barrel-like basket containing the grapes, and is not in reality where grapes are placed, as the images always show (see photos of real presses below).  A vat or floor designed for real treading by foot would be much deeper, and more typically circular.
  Although several of the biblical passages the image draws upon emphasize juice-stained clothing and "treading" by foot, by using a mechanical winepress the need for workers to tread the grapes with their feet in an open vat was removed.  It seems unlikely that a mechanical winepress was actually meant by any of the various biblical texts, although mechanisms are described by Roman authors, the detailed operation of which remains unclear.  The image in art emphasizes Christ's role as what is trodden rather than as a treader, but also retains his role as treader, though such red staining as is shown is usually from blood rather than juice.  In the early typological image at Comburg there is already conflation between the method of pressing just using the feet of farm-workers in an open vat, and the mechanical basket press, which uses a heavy beam controlled by a large wooden screw, bearing down on a plate pressing the grapes.  The other end of the beam from the screw is held in a wooden framework, which is often shown, but the essential handles for turning the screw are less often seen.  Sometimes they are shown with a small hovering half-length God the Father doing the turning.  However, in reality the bottom of the screw would either press on the centre of a plate in a relatively small frame, "basket" or barrel containing the grapes (as illustrated at right), or in the more common type with the screw at the end of the beam, the bottom of the screw would sit in a fixed socket on the ground.  In the images the bottom of the screw often goes uselessly into the side of the open pressing floor.
  With a large rectangular pressing-floor, such as Christ is usually shown standing in, the screw might be located centrally, with framework on both sides. Either a large plate underneath the screw would press down on grapes placed in the rectangular floor, or a smaller one on grapes in a circular barrel-like basket sitting on the floor, the juice usually flowing out onto the floor and being collected from a discharge point in that.  Both the real presses shown below are of this latter type.  As the general standard of artistic depictions of complicated mechanicisms improved in the Renaissance, with a fuller understanding of graphical perspective, some images after about 1500 show more realistic large plates pressing down on Christ, still a difficult depiction for the artist to represent.
caption: German memorial of 1649, with the allegory of Christ redeeming his Church. The press is relatively realistic, with a central screw, but the cross replaces a plate pressing on Christ.
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