Completed in 1878, Pornokratès — also titled Lady with Pig — is the canonical work of Belgian decadence and Félicien Rops's most reproduced image. A nude woman walks blindfolded across a stone parapet, led by a pig on a leash. Beneath her bare feet, three putti recoil in mourning beside a frieze of academic plaster casts. Above her, a black sky cut by smoke. The picture is a single concentrated allegory of nineteenth-century European modernity's complicity with its own corruption.

Rops worked the image as a heliogravure print after a watercolor; the etched form is the one that circulated widely. The artist was a friend and frequent collaborator of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Huysmans, and Péladan; the picture sits at the exact center of the literary-decadent circle that shaped European modernism. Joris-Karl Huysmans called Rops the only artist who had understood the period.

The plate is held at the King Baudouin Foundation collection. Pornokratès remains the single image that crystallises the Belgian decadent register: aristocratic, ironic, ornate, refusing both moralism and naivety.