Forest Scene from the Tale of Nastagio degli Onesti, in Boccaccio's "Decameron" (Q19858964)

description: In Renaissance Italy, idealized paintings of landscapes were defined by single-point perspective, a compositional device that favored a human view of the world over traditional religious formats. Here, Davide Ghirlandaio organizes his painting around a female nude fleeing amid systematically receding trees. The artist manipulates the Tuscan country-side to create a nearly symmetrical setting for a cautionary tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron (1348–51). The story tells of a reluctant bride who is hunted and slaughtered by the knight she has rejected, and then suffers the same fate each week as a ghost. The painter uses native umbrella pines to frame the characters in this human hunt. The fading blue mountains in the distance reveal the recent innovation of aerial perspective, introduced to Florence by Leonardo da Vinci.