This lunette is one of numerous decorative elements—leaded-glass windows, murals, a sculpted ceiling, and embroidered tapestries—that La Farge provided for the enormous châteaulike mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, designed by the architect George Browne Post and built on Fifty-seventh Street between 1880 and 1882. In its design of arabesques incorporating grotesques and the central motif of an urn surmounted by a mask of Neptune, the lunette recalls Renaissance and Pompeiian ornament. La Farge's early use of innovative and experimental techniques in glass is especially evident in the serpents and griffins, where different pieces of colored glass were fused by melting the glass along with strips of copper wire.