Satyr Leading a Centauress Who Holds a Satyr Child 1727 - 1804

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo created this pen and wash drawing titled "Satyr Leading a Centauress Who Holds a Satyr Child," sometime in the 18th century. Tiepolo evokes a classical past with these mythological figures, but the work also speaks to the culture of his time. Made in Venice, this drawing hints at the city's famed Carnival celebrations and the broader culture of masquerade, spectacle, and the theater. Such entertainments inverted social hierarchies, and we can consider how this image and others like it might play with the tensions between civilization and nature, order and disorder. Perhaps this unruly group of mythological figures could be seen to reflect the increasingly libertine culture of Venice in the 1700s. The print room or the illustrated book would be key places to research images like this. Also worth investigating are the changing social functions of art academies during Tiepolo’s time. Images like this were made for a market, and their meanings are never fixed, but are always contingent on such social and institutional contexts.