Piero di Cosimo enjoyed a reputation as an artist of great originality and fantasy. This is one of the most important surviving works and one of the most poetic and mysterious of all Renaissance paintings. It may have formed part of a decorative scheme of panel paintings on the history of early man and his cultivation of the earth, based on De Rerum Natura, ('On the Nature of Things') by the Roman poet and philosopher of the 1st century AD, Lucretius. The strange beasts and exotic birds demonstrate the artist's vivid imagination and the beautiful treatment of the landscape place Piero di Cosimo in the forefront of the development of landscape painting.

Presented in 1933.