Young Bacchus Riding a Leopard Led By a Satyr Blowing a Horn

Wenceslaus Hollar engraved book illustrations and several series of frieze-like bacchanal prints for his friend the Flemish painter Pieter van Avont, whose specialties also included devotional images of cherubs similar to ancient figures of the infant Eros. This sheet shows a wreathed infant Dionysos astride a leopard, an animal sacred to the god. The taller satyr blowing his horn at the front leads the procession onward in search of the next vineyard. Avont and Hollar may have been aware of Giuio Carpioni’s contemporaneous example of the children’s bacchanal (1942.348), with its more realistic, yet eerier figures.