Artwork story
About A Hunting Scene
The artist and artwork
Piero di Cosimo painted A Hunting Scene around 1494–1500 as an unusually wide Renaissance narrative, now preserved in tempera and oil transferred to Masonite. The Florentine artist fills nearly five and a half feet with human hunters, satyrs, centaurs, dogs, lions, bears, and deer. Instead of a familiar saint's life or courtly hunt, Piero imagines humanity at an unsettled beginning. The Met's educator resource compares his investigative attention to natural phenomena with Leonardo da Vinci's.
The world around it
The panel was made during a turbulent moment in Florence. Lorenzo de' Medici died in 1492, the Medici were expelled in 1494, and the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola used sermons and inexpensive illustrated pamphlets to press for religious and civic reform before his execution in 1498. At the same time, Renaissance scholars were recovering ancient texts. The Met links Piero's series to the Roman writers Lucretius and Vitruvius: Lucretius's poem, rediscovered in the fifteenth century, explained the world through natural rather than divine causes, while Vitruvius described fire as a catalyst for speech, society, and dwellings. The picture turns those learned ideas into a violent origin story.
A detail to notice
At first glance, everything attacks everything else, but Piero organized the chaos carefully. Two central tree trunks divide the panorama and send the eye down different routes. Between them, a figure grapples with a wild boar while a monkeylike creature clings to one trunk. On the right, a rider, distant centaurs, and a foreshortened body continue the diagonal. On the left, humans and satyrs cooperate against animals as a forest fire glows in the distance. That fire is more than scenery: within the series' classical account of early humanity, it marks the force that can drive creatures into danger while beginning the transition toward organized life. A companion panel, The Return from the Hunt, shows the hunters carrying their spoils home.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is painting made in Tempera and oil transferred to Masonite and held in the European Paintings department.
Recorded dimensions include 27 3/4 x 66 3/4 in. (70.5 x 169.5 cm).
Subject terms include Bears, Men, Hunting, Centaurs, Satyrs, and Deer. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Gift of Robert Gordon, 1875.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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