The story of this stag hunt goes back to an inscription on a memorial tablet of the 13th Century, once in the possession of Giovanni Battista Ubaldini, and now in the Villa del Monte in Galliano. The inscription commemorates the occasion in 1184, when the young Ubaldo Ubaldini, on a hunt in the Mugello, held a stag by the antlers so that Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa could kill it. The emperor in gratitude gave Ubaldo the stag's head with its antlers to be his coat-of-arms.

The iconography of the composition comes from the genealogical story Istoria della casa degli Ubaldini, published by Giovanni Battista Ubaldini in 1588.

A drawing in the Uffizi (5167S) shows Frederick I Barbarossa giving the stag's head to the young Ubaldo. A study for the present composition is in the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York