The Hunt

Giovanni di Francesco's The Hunt, painted around 1450 and now in the Munich Central Collecting Point, is a secular narrative painting depicting a hunting scene — a relatively rare subject in Italian panel painting of this period, where most surviving works are religious. Hunting was the aristocratic sport par excellence in medieval and Renaissance Europe, associated with nobility, physical prowess, and mastery over nature, and its depiction on cassoni, spalliere, and other domestic furnishings reflected the social aspirations and actual leisure activities of wealthy urban patrons.

Tempera on panel. The hunting scene is rendered with the horizontal, panoramic format typical of secular narrative furniture painting. Mounted hunters, dogs, and quarry move across a landscape setting that provides spatial depth unusual in devotional works of the period.