The Way We Were

The terrestrial paradise of Eden was, of course, a garden: Adam and Eve lived there, and the landlord was the Creator. During the Golden Age, the first god Saturn ruled over a world where humans feasted merrily and never aged (so Hesiod tells us). There are many accounts of the world’s origin, but the version attested by such authors as Lucretius and Vitruvius is much rougher: primitive mankind lived like beasts – more ferarum, as the Latin would have it – in a wild and howling forest teeming with ravenous maneaters. Museums abound with depictions of Eden and the first couple, most of them representing the Golden Age of Saturn’s reign (Cranach the Elder, Ingres…). Only one artist opted to portray a primal state of savagery and anarchy: a Renaissance Florentine, Piero di Cosimo. Piero was a radical environmentalist who believed that Mother Nature’s business “should be left to her care, untouched,” and while the Medici planted gardens, he dreamed of unspoiled forest in a barbaric, primordial world – a world that he sought to embody, as far as was possible, in his own way of life.