LONDON.- Colnaghi is spotlighting six works from In Vino Veritas: The Visual Rhetoric of Wine, its London exhibition exploring the visual culture of wine, drinking, conviviality and still life across centuries.

On view at Colnaghi London through July 31, 2026, the exhibition brings together antiquities and paintings that trace how wine and its rituals have shaped artistic production, social exchange and symbolic meaning from the Bronze Age to the early modern period.

Among the works featured are five antiquities priced under £25,000, along with a bonus Spanish still life painting. Together, they offer a compact journey through the evolution of drinking vessels, decorative traditions and the cultural settings in which wine was consumed, poured, celebrated and represented.

Two Mycenaean kylikes from the 14th century B.C. open the selection. Both terracotta vessels belong to one of the earliest Greek traditions of drinking cups. Created during a period of Mycenaean expansion, the works show a moment of transition in Aegean ceramic production. Their forms preserve elements of earlier mainland pottery while anticipating the shapes that would later become central to the Greek symposium.

The second Mycenaean kylix shows the refinement of painted pottery in the period. Drawing on vegetal and marine ornament associated with Minoan Crete, Mycenaean artists transformed those motifs into more abstract, ordered designs. The result points toward the decorative language that would become one of the foundations of Greek ceramic art.

Also included is a “Carian Wild Goat Style” trefoil oinochoe, made in the eastern Greek world around the late 7th or early 6th century B.C. Produced in southwestern Anatolia, the vessel belongs to one of the most distinctive regional styles of the Orientalising period, when trade, migration and cultural exchange across the eastern Mediterranean reshaped Greek visual culture. Its form and decoration reflect a world in motion, where objects carried both practical use and evidence of far-reaching artistic contact.





A Greek Attic black-figure eye cup, made in Athens around 530-520 B.C., brings the viewer directly into the performative world of the symposium. Such cups were designed not only for drinking but also for display, humor and ritual. Their painted eyes were believed to offer protection, while the act of drinking transformed the user into a kind of living mask: the handles became ears, the foot suggested a snout and the painted eyes merged with the drinker’s face. The object captures the wit, theatricality and social choreography of elite Greek drinking culture.

Another Archaic Greek vessel, a black-figure neck amphora produced around 530-520 B.C., reflects the artistic exchanges taking place in Greek colonies in southern Italy. The amphora belongs to the Chalcidian tradition, one of the finest ceramic expressions of the dialogue between migration, trade and regional innovation in the ancient Mediterranean. As Greek settlers established new cities beyond the Aegean, workshops adapted mainland techniques while developing local styles of their own.

The selection concludes with a bonus painting: Antonio Ponce’s Still Life with a Basket of Fruit and Tray with Sweets, painted in Madrid around 1640. A documented pupil of Juan van der Hamen, Ponce was part of the second generation of Spanish still-life painters who helped turn the bodegón into one of the defining genres of Spain’s Golden Age. In this work, fruit and sweets are arranged with the clarity and refinement that appealed to the sophisticated taste of the Habsburg court.

Seen together, the works reveal the many roles played by wine and its surrounding culture: as ritual, luxury, social performance, symbol and subject of artistic invention. From Mycenaean drinking cups to Athenian symposium vessels and Spanish still life, In Vino Veritas shows how the visual rhetoric of wine has persisted across time, linking the pleasures of the table with deeper histories of exchange, identity and representation.

In Vino Veritas: The Visual Rhetoric of Wine is on view at Colnaghi London until July 31, 2026.