Art Institute of Chicago

Satyrs Dancing from Bacchanales, or Satyrs' Games

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Date

1763

Medium

Etching on ivory laid paper

Culture

France

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Fragonard may have copied the relief within his Satyrs Dancing from an ancient bacchic sarcophagus. The swaying nymph holds a noise-making rattle, and the artist implies that, however improbably, this sculptural figure has deposited her pinecone-topped thyrsos outside the frame. It leans at a jaunty angle in the bacchic vessel at left, which is decorated with a smirking face and grapevine crown. The thyrsos was one of the wine god Dionysos’s main attributes. These figures could well all be part of the bacchic entourage, including the nymph’s satyr spouse and three children.

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