The Forest Fire

Around 1505 in Florence, educated people were passing around a Roman poem that had been lost for a thousand years and dug out of a German monastery library less than a century before, Lucretius's account of how the world and human life began. Piero di Cosimo seems to have read it, or heard it discussed, and painted this: the moment fire first tears through a forest and every creature runs. Cattle, deer, birds and other animals scatter across one of the earliest pure landscapes in Italian painting. Look closely at a couple of the animals and you find human faces grafted onto them, as if mankind here is only half formed. Lucretius thought fire came to people by accident, from just such a blaze, and that everything civilised followed from it.