A Hunting Scene

A Hunting Scene by Piero di Cosimo, dated around 1500 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, belongs to a series of mythological-historical narrative paintings depicting prehistoric humanity — panels sometimes called the 'Primitive Man' series that also includes the Return from the Hunt and scenes of forest fire and battle. These unusual paintings imagined the life of humanity before civilization, drawing on classical texts by Lucretius and others about primitive existence. Piero di Cosimo was one of Renaissance Florence's most eccentric personalities — reportedly refusing to cook or clean, living on hard-boiled eggs, and keeping his studio untouched by brooms — and his paintings reflect a genuinely idiosyncratic imagination unlike any of his contemporaries.

Oil on panel with Piero di Cosimo's distinctive treatment of animal and human figures in landscape — the hunting scene populated with both real and fantastic creatures, the landscape extending with the atmospheric depth he learned from Flemish painting and perhaps from Leonardo. His animals are observed with unusual zoological curiosity alongside their mythological function.