Nastagio degli Onesti

One Friday in early May, Nastagio walks through a pine forest at dusk, where he sees a girl running naked in tears, being chased by two dogs trying to bite her and a Knight with a black sword intending to kill her.

He witnesses the agony inflicted on the young girl by the rider, after which the two are forced to start the chase again and disappear from Nastagio's sight.

The young man decides to take advantage of the situation and prepares a lavish banquet in the same place of the forest on the following Friday, inviting the relatives of his beloved together with his parents.

Sandro Botticelli made a series of four panels that illustrate many episodes of the story by Boccaccio, thought to have been commissioned by Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1483 as a gift to Giannozzo Pucci at his marriage to Lucrezia Bini of that year.

Even the scene of the "infernal hunt", already present in Divine Comedy, the Canto of Pietro della Vigna, is inserted by Boccaccio in a setting very different from natural to Dante, a locus amoenus in which assumes traits much less gruesome and more like those of a sacred representation.