Amor op een sater met teugels 1719

This print by Charles Dupuis presents us with the allegorical image of Amor, or Cupid, riding a satyr. The image creates meaning through its visual codes, cultural references, and historical associations that would have been easily readable in its own time. Likely made in France, the image engages with the social structures of its time through its knowing references to classical antiquity. Cupid's bow and arrow, the satyr's association with wildness and lust, all speak to a set of cultural and historical narratives that would have been known to a cultured French audience. As such it is an object of progressive thinking, and a critique of art institutions. To understand this image better, a historian might research the classical sources available to artists in the 17th and 18th centuries. These can give us a greater insight into the way art is contingent on social and institutional context.