From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Giorgione’s Three Philosophers (c. 1508/09) depicts the Three Ages of Man, but can also be read as three stages of knowing. The old figure embodies inherited, bookish wisdom (ancient authority); the middle-aged man in the centre signals the transmission of classical science through Islamic medieval astronomy; the youngest figure turns outward towards empirical Renaissance observation, signalling a new science being born. 

Another of Giorgione’s paintings, The Tempest (c. 1503–09), was the philosopher Roger Scruton’s favourite work of art. Scruton, a wine-lover, argued for the consciousness-expanding use of drink: ‘Wine is not just an object of pleasure, but an object of knowledge; and the pleasure depends on the knowledge.’

A taste of how artists painted philosophers over the centuries reveals the ways in which images of drinking are also images for thinking, for testing our ideas about humanity’s place in the world. It makes sense: a slight blur, of the kind that a moderate intake of alcohol brings about, can, paradoxically, sharpen attention, nudging the mind towards analogy, opening the door but not blowing it off its hinges.

So Raphael, in his School of Athens (1509), includes Epicurus, adorned with a wreath of vine leaves, among his catalogue of thinkers, implying that Epicureanism was also a path to truth. 

Jusepe de Ribera’s Philosopher with a Wine Flask (c. 1630–40) is a half-length portrait of a bearded philosopher dressed simply (torn white shirt, brown jacket) and holding books in one hand and a wine-flask vessel in the other. This was part of Ribera’s ‘ragged philosopher’ series, in which thinkers are rendered as ascetics or beggars, carrying the symbols of knowledge (books) and of daily life or conviviality (wine-flask). 

A portrait of Robert Boyle (1627–91) in the Wellcome Collection, by an unknown artist, depicts the philosopher and founder of modern chemistry clutching a vial with a crowded table of glassware behind him. As part of his experimental work on colours and chemical reactions, Boyle conducted tests on claret wine in the 1670s. His meticulous notebooks are among the earliest sensorial descriptions and tasting notes on aroma, flavour and colour.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Diogenes (1860) places the Cynic philosopher surrounded by his dog companions, in a pithos, an earthenware tub used to store wine in antiquity. The work is clear and precise, and what seems like moral solitude (canine companions notwithstanding) becomes splendour. The vessel is a symbol of the wine jar as a cell for thought.

Before Socrates drank whatever vintage of hemlock he’s about to swallow in Jacques Louis-David’s The Death of Socrates (1787), he was debating virtue and morality in Athenian symposia, parties designed for drinking and talking. Anton Petter’s Socrates Reproaching Alcibiades (1821) stages the philosopher’s moral intervention as classical theatre. In a marble chamber of restraint and excess, Socrates confronts his gifted but wayward pupil. Neoclassical wisdom disciplines desire and antiquity can do no wrong.

The benefits that come with age and intoxication are perhaps also conveyed in Matisse’s ink drawing Duo des deux philosophes (1910). The artist and his lifelong friend Dr Léon Vassaux, sitting together over a shared glass, are the ‘philosophers’. Matisse’s caption reads: À nos âges un seul verre de vin est suffisant et ne peut faire mal aux artères (‘At our age a single glass of wine is enough and can’t harm the arteries’). Vassaux was also Matisse’s physician, so the title presumably reflects doctor’s orders.

Lyubov Popova’s Portrait of a Philosopher (Cubist Construction) (c. 1915) translates the ancient figure of the thinker and his glass into the fractured grammar of modernism. Planes of ochre and grey intersect, suggesting that reflection itself has become material, constructed and unstable. The symposium is replaced by the structure of dynamic geometries of intellect and intoxication. In Popova’s hands, the philosopher’s cup is no longer an object of pleasure, but a vessel of perception, shattered, rearranged and made new.

Another solitary figure, seemingly half prophet, half phantom, lies in a timeless landscape in Salvador Dalí’s Philosopher Illuminated by the Light of the Moon and the Setting Sun (1939). Here too there’s a shattering of thought suggested by lunar light and the sunset’s glow: what the mind knows through drinking is in doubt, and thinking is suspended between the material and the mystical. 

The portrait of Scruton painted by the Chinese-born, London-based artist Lantian, which won the Ondaatje Prize for Portraiture in 2016, depicts him as a Pierrot figure, grounded but melancholy. That feels apt for the philosopher who wrote in his memoirs of the sensual awakening of making homemade wine, when delight of taste and touch opened heart as well as mind.

From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.