Putti with a Wine Press by Albertinelli, Mariotto

Mariotto Albertinelli painted *Putti with a Wine Press* in Florence around 1500. It is a joyful, chaotic scene of cherubic figures working a wooden press, a symbol of abundance and the pleasures of the harvest. But the painting’s true story is one of a man deeply conflicted by his own talent.

Look first at the crowned putto drinking wine at the very top. He is the focal point, an image of pure indulgence. Your eye then falls to the figures stomping grapes inside the barrel, and finally to the putto lying on the ground with a jug. The sequence is a gentle, humorous arc from celebration to quiet collapse.

Albertinelli was a friend and collaborator of Fra Bartolomeo, and his style was a bridge between the archaic and the High Renaissance. Yet he was famously troubled by the intellectual demands of the new art. He once declared that perspective and anatomy gave him so much anxiety he could not continue. So he closed his workshop and opened a tavern instead, hoping for a simpler life.

The inn was a disaster. The former painter proved hopeless at business, and within about a year he returned to his brushes. He died in 1515, still a young man, having produced a small but luminous body of work. One wonders if he ever found the peace he was looking for, or if it always remained just outside the frame.