The Creation of Man by Prometheus

Sometime between about 1510 and 1515, Piero di Cosimo painted two long panels meant to be set into the woodwork of a room, and on them he told a story that, according to the museum, no painter of the modern era had yet told in pictures, the myth of Prometheus. This is the first half. At its centre stands the statue of a young man that Prometheus has shaped. Nearby the goddess Minerva talks with him, and then she carries him up toward the heavens to find the spark that will bring the figure to life. Piero followed Boccaccio, whose great handbook of the pagan gods had reread the old myth as a story about how human beings are made and then taught. The second half, now in Strasbourg, finishes the tale. Prometheus steals fire from the chariot of the sun, wakes the statue with his torch, and is bound to a tree by Mercury while Jupiter's eagle waits. The two halves now hang in different countries, and Munich bought this one in 1918 from the Kauffmann collection in Berlin.