1704
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
The Four Festivals: Festival of Diana is a 1704 by Claude Gillot, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a wild party in the woods: naked and half-dressed people dance around a stone altar topped with a goddess’s bust, while goat-legged satyrs crash the scene. This is one of four prints celebrating nature gods. The caption says the satyrs are “troubling” the festival—you can tell by their grins and the way they lean into the trees. The artist packed the edges with leaves and branches, making the forest feel like a living frame. To see how other artists drew myth in the woods, look up subject: france, 18th century.
This depiction of the festival of Diana, Roman goddess of forests and animals, accompanies three other scenes glorifying the nature gods Faunus, Bacchus, and Pan. In each print a frame of flourishing vegetation surrounds nude and semi-nude figures who frolic around an altar with a bust to the god. The caption below the Festival of Diana declares that this celebration is being "troubled by satyrs," whose muscular, goat-legged bodies and leering faces appear at either edge of the wooded grove.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Claude Gillot (April 27, 1673 – May 4, 1722) was a French painter, printmaker, and illustrator, best known as the master of Watteau and Lancret.
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