Francois Perrier’s etching is modeled after a marble sculpture excavated from the Borghese gardens in the seventeenth century. The personification of love, Eros, sits on the back of a centaur and torments him, a metaphor for the soul tormented by the pain of love. Perrier’s approach to the sculpture does not
emphasize the emotional interactions of the figures, but focuses on the sensuous depiction of the soft body of the putti, and the dynamic, muscular forms of the centaur.