Satyrs Dancing from Bacchanales, or Satyrs' Games

Museum record 111931: Satyrs Dancing from Bacchanales, or Satyrs' Games by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. A verified entry point for discovery.

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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 ba…