A 500-Year-Old Painting, A Bottle of Wine and a Letter from Tuscany
It started, as some of the best stories do, around a dinner table. Good friends, a late evening, and a remarkable bottle of Brunello.
Our friends were building a beautiful new home. Their Christian faith was woven into the project from the beginning—quite literally. Throughout construction, they invited family, friends, and even subcontractors to write favorite scriptures on the framing in black Sharpie. The words would eventually disappear behind drywall, but their presence would remain.
Back to the dinner. My friend Toni was particularly taken with the label on our wine. A golden angel, robes flowing against a blue-green mantle, captured in a few confident strokes.
Somewhere between admiring the label and finishing the bottle, an idea took shape. Before the night was over, I had a commission for an angel collage quilt for their home.
From Wine Label to Fabric
I knew this angel had to be Michael the Archangel. Warrior. Protector. A powerful figure standing between light and darkness.
Using the label as my inspiration, I developed my own interpretation, reimagining the colors, refining the figure, and creating a dramatic background that would give him both movement and presence.
Then came the fabric.
Thousands of pieces. Seven months of cutting, layering, auditioning, rearranging, and fusing.
Russets, ochres, and golds brought warmth to his robes. Steel blues and seafoam greens gave movement to the mantle. Every fabric had a job to do—catch the light here, deepen a shadow there, suggest the fold of a garment or the strength of an outstretched arm.
I spent hours auditioning fabrics before making a single cut. And even then, the choices changed as the piece developed. That’s one of my favorite things about fabric collage: the artwork has a way of telling you what it needs.
Once the collage was complete, the quilting began.
Using fine monofilament and metallic threads, I stitched along the contours of the figure, securing thousands of pieces while adding dimension and shimmer. The quilting took nearly as long as creating the collage itself.
As the light moves across Archangel, the fabrics and threads reveal different colors, textures, and details. It’s one of those pieces that rewards a closer look.
A Closer Look
A Letter to Tuscany
I thought the creative journey was over when I finished the quilt.
Not quite.
Quilting Arts magazine had issued a call for submissions, and on a whim, I decided to send photographs of Archangel.
But first, I wanted to understand more about the image that started it all.
Something about that wine label had always reminded me of an Old Master painting. The dramatic pose, the rich colors, the weight and movement of the figure. A little internet detective work led me to Domenico Beccafumi, a Renaissance painter from Siena. Could the Valdicava label have been inspired by his painting of Saint Michael?
There was only one way to find out.
I wrote to Valdicava, the winery in Montalcino, Italy, sharing a photograph of my quilt, thanking them for the inspiration, and asking about the label.
I hoped someone might answer.
I never imagined the response.
PierFilippo Abbruzzese wrote back to tell me he had shared my quilt with his parents, his colleagues, and the entire winery team. He called it “a fantastic work of art.” I was absolutely humbled.
And my hunch was right.
The label was inspired by Beccafumi’s San Michele, painted around 1530.
But PierFilippo didn’t stop there. He shared the remarkable story behind the label—and the family that chose it.
His great-grandfather was born on the property in 1911, when the family had very little. He eventually became a successful businessman, purchased the estate in 1953, and helped found the Consorzio del Brunello in 1966.
When PierFilippo’s father took over the winery in 1987, he wanted to honor Montalcino’s rich winemaking traditions while bringing a fresh perspective to Brunello.
And, together with the woman who would become his wife—they had only just begun dating!—he found the perfect inspiration.
Beccafumi’s angel.
What fascinated me most was why they chose it.
PierFilippo explained that Beccafumi belonged to the Mannerist movement. These artists carried forward the great traditions of the Renaissance, but they weren’t content merely to repeat what had come before. They wanted to reinterpret it.
The angel’s fiery reds and oranges contrasted dramatically with the cool blues and greens of his mantle. Tradition and innovation, captured in a single image.
PierFilippo’s father wanted to do something similar with his wine: preserve the character and heritage of Montalcino while creating a Brunello with a modern elegance all its own.
And there I was, nearly forty years later, doing something remarkably similar with fabric.
Taking an old image, celebrating what made it beautiful, and finding a new way to tell its story.
The label has remained unchanged ever since. What began as a fresh interpretation of a Renaissance painting has become an enduring symbol of the winery itself.
But there was another connection in PierFilippo’s letter that stayed with me.
He described his family’s commitment to caring for their countryside, calling themselves “protectors of the territory.”
Protectors.
I thought about our friends and their new home, its framing filled with scripture and prayers for the people who would gather there.
I thought about Michael the Archangel, a warrior and protector, whose image had traveled from a Renaissance painting to a Tuscan wine label and eventually into my studio.
And I thought about a family in Italy, working across generations to protect both the land entrusted to them and the traditions they had inherited.
What began as a commission inspired by a beautiful wine label had become something more: a story about what we value, what we preserve, and what we carry forward.
A Renaissance painter in Siena, nearly five hundred years ago.
“We are honoured to have inspired such a beautiful piece!”
– PierFilippo Abbruzzese, Valdicava
PierFilippo closed his letter by inviting me to visit Valdicava someday. He even suggested that we travel to Siena together to see Beccafumi’s original painting. I hope to do so someday.
.
Epilogue
As if this story needed one more unexpected turn, Archangel was selected for publication in Quilting Arts magazine!
I’m thrilled that a quilt inspired by a bottle of wine shared among friends will now have an opportunity to reach people far beyond our dinner table.
And I’m especially grateful to Toni, whose eye for a beautiful wine label started this whole adventure, and to PierFilippo and the Abbruzzese family for so generously sharing their own chapter of the story.
Archangel
48″ × 60″ · 2026
Fabric collage · Raw-edge appliqué · Quilting
Original textile interpretation inspired by Valdicava’s label and Domenico Beccafumi’s San Michele
