This print reproduces a drawing by Girolamo Parmagianino (1503-1540). Resembling a wash drawing, it was printed using a technique called chiaroscuro woodcut. The technique developed from the woodcut, but where woodcuts printed outline and shading, chiaroscuro built up the image using areas of colour. Each colour needed a separate block. This print relies on the combined effect of four shades of green. The white of the paper adds the important highlights, imitating the white painted highlights of drawings heightened with white pigment.

In 1516 Ugo da Carpi claimed to have invented the technique when he petitioned the Venetian Senate for exclusive right to use it, claiming that it was 'something new and never done before, and it is a lovely thing and useful to many who take pleasure in drawing'. The technique was actually first developed in Germany, but Ugo da Carpi was probably the first to use it in Italy.

Carpi may have made this image on his own initiative without the artist's cooperation. The only artist known to have produced chiaroscuro prints under Parmagianino's approval and control was Antonio da Trento.

The subject is Diogenes, a cynic who, according to legend, lived in a jar and famously represented man as a plucked chicken in ridicule of Plato's description of man as a featherless biped. Jars were depicted in ancient reliefs and sculptures, but in this image Diogenes' home has become a barrel. It has been suggested that the source for this change might be a 1480 Italian translation of 'Lives of the Philosophers', which used the word 'botte' (cask) reflecting the then current practice of storing wine in casks rather than jars.