The Story of Nastagio Degli Onesti, part one

In 1483 a wealthy Florentine, Antonio Pucci, ordered four painted panels to celebrate his son's wedding to Lucrezia Bini. For the young couple's home he chose an unsettling tale from Boccaccio's Decameron. In this first scene a rejected lover, Nastagio, wanders into a pine wood near Ravenna and stumbles on a horror: a woman chased by hounds and a knight on horseback, both condemned to repeat the hunt forever because in life she scorned the man who loved her. Botticelli designed the sequence, though assistants, chiefly Bartolomeo di Giovanni, carried out much of the painting. The story was aimed squarely at a bride, a warning in bright colour against refusing a suitor. The pines run in neat repeated trunks, the same wood we pass through again in the panels that follow.