The performer’s thin body comes into obvious contrast with the massive figure of the strong man in the foreground. Her arms are stretched upward as she tries to achieve balance on the unstable ball. The artist managed to find an unusual compositional approach: the girl’s gesture somehow connects her figure with the sky, and it is plain to see that the color of her tights is sky-blue.

Though we can only see the athlete from behind and just one leg is shown in the painting, if we look closely, we see his other foot and right knee. At first, his posture was a little different, but Picasso reworked the composition later. In the final version of ‘Young Acrobat on a Ball’, the performer sort of leans on the athlete: if his figure was taken out of the painting, this fragile balance would be lost.

According to researchers, the image of a young acrobat on a ball is a reference back to Renaissance iconography of Fortune, the goddess of fate, though the stable cube on which the athlete is sitting is associated with the concept of Valiance. We do not know if such an interpretation was implied by Picasso. It does seem quite possible, however, considering his love of artistic allegories and the fact that by 1905, he had already spent a few years among the Parisian intellectual elite and attended lectures by the poet Moréas, who proclaimed a return to the ideals of Greek and Latin literature.

In the background we can see a white horse in the landscape. The horse is a recurrent motif in the artist’s works of this period. We can also see it in “Boy Leading a Horse” and many sketches, such as “Harlequin on a Horse” and “Family of Saltimbanques”.