Return from the Hunt by Piero di Cosimo

Return from the Hunt by Piero di Cosimo, dated around 1500 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, belongs to the same 'Primitive Man' series as A Hunting Scene and The Forest Fire — a group of panels imagining early human life before civilization. This scene shows prehistoric humans and satyrs returning with their hunting spoils, the animal-human boundary blurred in a world Piero imagined as existing before the social and cultural divisions that separated civilization from nature. The Metropolitan's painting is among the most complex and populated of the series, with multiple human and animal figures arranged in a landscape of extraordinary atmospheric depth. Piero di Cosimo's prehistoric series is unique in the Renaissance for its systematic imaginative exploration of pre-civilized human existence.

Oil on panel with the horizontal format suited to a processional return — hunters, their prey, and accompanying animals moving across the landscape toward the viewer. Piero's handling of the mixed company of humans and satyrs gives equal observational attention to both, the human and semi-animal figures coexisting in the same pictorial space without hierarchy.