A Hunting Scene

Around 1500 in Florence, scholars were poring over Lucretius, a Roman poem that explained the birth of humankind with no gods in it at all, just early people slowly rising out of a brutal animal existence. Piero di Cosimo painted that vision. In a wood set ablaze, men, satyrs, and beasts fall on one another and on the animals fleeing the fire, half-human and half-wild, long before laws or towns. It was made as a spalliera, fitted into the panelling of a room in a wealthy Florentine's house, with a companion scene of the hunters trudging home. The biographer Vasari said Piero lived nearly as wildly as his subject, letting his garden run feral and living on hard-boiled eggs he cooked in batches.