Nastagio: First Panel

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A closer look

A young man appears twice among straight pine trunks. First he looks down in thought; a moment later he steps forward, distracted by a sudden rush through the grove. A naked woman runs towards him as a hound leaps at her. Behind her, an armoured rider charges on a white horse with his sword raised. Far beyond the trees, the sea appears peaceful. Botticelli's first panel of The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti makes a violent apparition interrupt an otherwise ordered landscape.^[1][4]

This is the first of four paintings made in 1483 for a Florentine marriage. The Prado in Madrid owns the first three, and the fourth is in a private collection. Its current record identifies this panel as P002838, describes its technique as mixed method on wood, and gives its dimensions as 82.3 × 139 cm. Botticelli devised the series and worked on some figures, while assistants also helped execute it. That collaborative history belongs in the object's identity rather than being hidden behind a single name.^[1][2]

The Prado's catalogue uses the same general title for all three of its panels. The inventory number is therefore essential: P002838 is the first scene, where Nastagio enters the wood and encounters the hunt; P002839 shows the next, more violent phase; P002840 shows the banquet at which the apparition returns. The public route title names the story, but this page concerns the first object rather than a single painting containing the complete tale.^[1][2]

Contents

1. At a Glance
2. Boccaccio's Story Arrives in the Pines
3. The Grove as a Stage
4. What the First Panel Withholds
5. Botticelli and the Workshop

Boccaccio's Story Arrives in the Pines

The source is the eighth story of the fifth day of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. Nastagio, a wealthy young man from Ravenna, has been rejected by the woman he wants to marry. His friends urge him to leave the city for a while, and he goes to the pine woods near Classe. There he sees a terrified woman pursued by two hounds and a mounted knight. The knight, Guido degli Anastagi, explains that he too had suffered rejection. After he died by suicide, both he and the woman became trapped in a repeated hunt in the afterlife. The Prado recounts this background to identify the scene.^[1][3]

The painting does not have to show all of that explanation. It gives us Nastagio at the threshold of understanding. At the left, a small group remains near a tent. Nastagio then appears among the trees, and appears again farther in, close to the fleeing woman. The repeated figure compresses his departure and the shock of seeing the chase into one landscape. Its width permits this continuous narrative: a viewer moves across space and, in doing so, through successive moments.^[1][4]

The woman is already within Nastagio's reach, but her pursuers are close behind. The dog touching her body, the rider's lifted sword and the horse's forward legs make the danger immediate. Botticelli does not yet show the rider catching and killing her. That event belongs to the next panel. The first picture holds the instant when Nastagio meets the spectacle and must decide how to respond. The division matters because the four panels originally made a sequence, each with its own stage of the tale.^[1][2]

The Grove as a Stage

The pine forest imposes a striking regularity on the scene. Tree trunks rise almost like columns, and their high crowns form a dark canopy. Open strips of ground between them let each figure remain visible. The order is fragile: the chase cuts across the trees, and the woman's diagonal run disrupts the vertical rhythm. Botticelli sets terror in a place that appears carefully arranged, making the interruption clearer than it would be in a chaotic wilderness.^[1]

The small figures by the tent at the far left are easy to miss in a reduced image. They locate Nastagio's departure from company before his solitary encounter. The two appearances of the young man make more sense when the panel is read as a story unfolding than when it is treated as a snapshot. To the right, the rider's red cloak and pale horse mark the force following the woman. Colour and scale guide us through separate actions without dividing the long panel into rigid boxes.^[1]

Boccaccio calls the knight's mount black in the tale, while the horse painted in this first panel is pale. That is a small but concrete difference between the transmitted story and Botticelli's image. The bright animal stands out among the dark pines, but the surviving sources cited here do not tell us why the painter chose its colour. The departure does not change the rider's identity or the violence of the chase; it reminds us that the panels interpret a text rather than mechanically illustrate every word.^[1][3]

Andrea Bayer's Metropolitan Museum catalogue entry notes another literary and visual connection. Boccaccio's hunted figures recall the wood of the suicides and violent spendthrifts in Inferno XIII, where hounds tear fleeing souls. Bayer compares the first solitary image of Nastagio in the pines with Botticelli's Dante drawing of the poet entering the wood in Inferno I. This is a productive comparison across Botticelli's work, not proof that he had the Dante sheet open while designing P002838. It explains why the grove can be read as more than neutral scenery: for readers who knew both writers, the graceful forest could carry an expectation of moral danger.^[5]

Between the trunks, the shore and a ship appear in the distance. The marine horizon locates the grove near Ravenna's coast, but it also gives the eye a calm route out of the dense forest. That open water does not offer escape within the tale. The hunt repeats, and the woman cannot simply run into the world beyond the trees. The visual contrast makes the episode more unsettling: a bright horizon coexists with an inescapable punishment.^[1][3]

What the First Panel Withholds

In Boccaccio's tale, Guido's explanation comes after Nastagio witnesses the pursuit. The hunt is a punishment repeated every Friday; when the rider catches the woman, he kills her and feeds her heart to the hounds before the scene begins again. The Prado's second panel takes up this later part of the encounter. By stopping the first panel before the killing, the series asks its viewers to carry suspense from one image to the next.^[2][3]

Nastagio later turns the apparition to his advantage. He invites the woman he hopes to marry and her relatives to a meal in the same woods, timed so that they will witness the hunt. The third panel shows the banquet and the guests' horror. In the story, the young woman agrees to marry him after seeing the fate imposed on the other woman. That conclusion has often been presented as a successful courtship, but the mechanism is intimidation. Naming that pressure makes the scene in the first panel more legible: it is the discovery of a spectacle Nastagio will deliberately stage for another audience.^[2][3]

The series was itself a marriage commission, according to the Prado. Antonio Pucci ordered it in 1483 for his son Giannozzo's wedding to Lucrezia Bini. The Pucci and Bini coats of arms, with the Medici arms, appear on the third panel. These heraldic signs support the commission's specific family setting; they are not details visible on P002838. A festive household setting and a story built around coercion sit uneasily together now, and the juxtaposition is part of the historical object rather than something to smooth away.^[1][2]

The Met catalogue phrases Antonio's role more cautiously as probable and emphasises Lorenzo de' Medici's part in arranging the Pucci–Bini marriage. It considers the four long panels likely to have hung in the couple's bedchamber, perhaps within wooden surrounds. Neither the precise hanging position nor the surrounds survive as a record of this first panel. What the proposed setting adds is a viewing context: this image of Nastagio's discovery would have formed one stage of a painted sequence in the household celebrating the marriage, rather than an isolated illustration of Boccaccio.^[5]

Botticelli and the Workshop

The Prado attributes the design of the group to Botticelli and recognises his hand in some figures. It also identifies work by assistants, including Bartolomeo di Giovanni and Jacopo del Sellaio. The catalogue's technical discussion notes that the first two panels contain relatively little underdrawing. In P002838, the lines laid down for figures are harder in character than those in the second panel, and the paint follows the planned outlines closely. Such evidence helps distinguish stages of production without assigning every tree, garment or face to one named painter.^[1][2]

The collaborative process suits a four-panel domestic commission. It does not lessen the importance of Botticelli's design, which makes the pine grove a coherent setting across actions that could have seemed disconnected. It does mean that the convenient phrase “by Botticelli” needs a little care. The series bears his overall conception, while its physical execution reflects several hands. The Prado's object record and longer series account make that distinction explicit.^[1][2]

The panel remained linked to the Pucci family until its nineteenth-century collecting history began. The Prado traces it through the Barker, Leyland, Aynard, Spiridon and Cambó collections; it entered the museum with Francisco Cambó's bequest in 1941. Today the first three episodes are reunited in Madrid, although the fourth is elsewhere. Their surviving relationship lets a visitor see how the initial encounter leads to later violence and to Nastagio's carefully planned banquet.^[1][2]

In the first panel alone, the outcome is suspended. Nastagio faces a woman in danger, a sword-bearing rider and an animal already at her side. The pine trunks hold the episode in an orderly grid, while the threat moves through it. Reading the scene closely reveals the paradox of the whole series: a graceful landscape carries a story of pursuit, punishment and marriage obtained through fear. Botticelli's design makes that collision visible before the tale has explained itself.^[1][2][3]

References

1. Museo Nacional del Prado, “Scenes from The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti,” P002838, first-panel object record, accessed through indexed Prado text 29 September 2026 View source.
2. Museo Nacional del Prado, “Scenes from the Story of Nastagio degli Onesti,” longer series catalogue account, accessed through indexed Prado text 29 September 2026 View source.
3. Giovanni Boccaccio, “Fifth Day, Eighth Tale,” Decameron Web at Brown University, original Italian text, accessed 29 September 2026 View source.
4. Museo Nacional del Prado, “Historia de Nastagio degli Onesti,” museum encyclopaedia account of the first panel's three narrative moments and workshop contributions, accessed through indexed Prado text 29 September 2026 View source.
5. Andrea Bayer, “The Banquet in the Pinewoods: Scene Three of The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti,” in Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008, cat. 139, pp. 300–303, especially p. 302; accessed 1 October 2026 View source View source.

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