4.The Cassone in Renaissance Italy

The Cassone in Renaissance Italy 

October 2018 | Stephen N. Fliegel

https://www.lagazzettaitaliana.com/history-culture/8909-the-cassone-in-renaissance-italy

Large decorative chests known as cassoni remained the most popular type of furniture in use in the homes of the Italian urban elite during the 14th through the 16th centuries. They were one of the trophy furnishings of rich merchants and aristocrats and cassoni would be recognizable in most Italian homes of this period. The basic form was extremely simple consisting of a roughly rectangular chest that served a variety of different functions. They stored and protected clothing, linens and other valuables and they could also be used as seats. Cassoni, however, varied greatly in terms of shape, size and decoration. Some versions were equipped with a lock for security and were known as forzieri. 

Wedding cassoni were the most popular of these chests. They were extremely ornate and were usually elaborately decorated with intarsia (inlaid wood of different colors), gilding and pastiglia (molded applied paste). Others were painted or carved. Though wedding cassoni served a practical function, they were commissioned primarily to commemorate a significant social occasion, a marriage. As such, the cassone represented one of the most prestigious pieces of furniture in the Renaissance home and became an important part of marriage rituals. 

During the 15th century, the front of a cassone was generally decorated with a painting. The painter and historian, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1575), referred to the custom of painting stories on cassoni, the subjects of which were chosen by the client. Great Florentine artists of the 15th century are known to have made their livelihood in part through the decoration of cassoni and some artists in Siena and Florence are known to have specialized in them. Sandro Botticelli, Paolo Uccello and Donatello, for example, were known to have painted them in addition to their other commissions. As Vasari complains, however, by his own time in the mid-16th century, artists thought such work was beneath them. By the 19th century, some collectors and dealers, who occasionally discarded the cassone itself, preserved the separated panels as paintings. A significant portion of the paintings preserved in museums today are panels or fragments that were originally part of a cassone. An example in the Cleveland Museum of Art was painted by Jacopo del Sellaio, an artist active in Florence. It shows a scene from Roman history, the Etruscan king Tarquinius Priscus, as he enters Rome. Once part of a cassone, it was separated at some point in its history and is now shown and preserved as a painting.

Records of the period indicate that these expensive chests were typically commissioned in pairs for the weddings of the daughters of the wealthy ruling classes. They were then conspicuously paraded through the streets from the bride’s family home to her husband’s as a clear statement of a new economic and political alliance between two elite families. Cassoni were therefore embellished with scenes appropriate for this public function with depictions of legendary heroes, histories, stories that emphasized the strength of love, conjugal virtues, and tales reminding husbands of their authority over their wives. Decoration was sometimes limited to putti (nude children), who held up the families’ coats of arms. These represented symbols of good luck and fertility and therefore the continuity of the family line. A typical place for such a cassone was in a chamber at the foot of a bed that was enclosed in curtains.

At the end of the 15th century, a new classicizing style emerged. Some early to mid-16th century cassoni drew their inspiration from Roman sarcophagi. In keeping with this new taste, the cassoni of central and northern Italy were now carved and partly gilded with friezes showing mythological scenes and other sculptural elements drawn from the classical past. An exquisite Venetian example from the mid-1500s, for example, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, features Tritons and other mythological figures. By the mid-16th century, Giorgio Vasari could snidely remark on the old-fashioned cassoni with painted scenes, examples of which could be seen in the palazzi of Florentine families, but were rapidly out of fashion. These painted chests were quickly disappearing. The inventories of the Medici wardrobe from 1553 reveal that they were relegated to the “rooms of wet nurses” while the newer, more fashionable, carved cassoni were placed in official spaces. The newer style called for elaborately carved chests with mythological and grotesque figures decorated with swags of fruit and flowers. 

Examples of Italian cassoni can be seen in many museums. They form an important source for our understanding of life and society in Italy during the Renaissance. They inform us of important cultural practices pertaining to love and marriage at the time. The stories and imagery used to decorate these cassoni tell us much about popular tastes and interests. Yet these magnificent pieces of furniture survive as consummate works of art to be admired for the great skill of the craftsmen and painters who produced them

Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence: The Courtauld Wedding Chests

12 February – 17 May 2009

…a sumptuous insight into Florentine society, culture and art during the Renaissance.

The Independent

…a surprisingly illuminating insight into life – and love – at the time.

London Paper

The Morelli Chest, 1472, The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

A marriage in 15th-century Florence was not primarily about love or religion. Instead it was a dynastic alliance between powerful families.

To celebrate these marriages, pairs of great chests, lavishly decorated with precious metals and elaborate paintings, were commissioned. These items – now generally called cassoni – were often the most expensive of a whole suite of decorative objects commissioned to celebrate marriage alliances between powerful families. They were displayed in Florentine palaces and used to store precious items such as clothes and textiles.

The painted panels set into the wedding chests tell fascinating tales from ancient Greece, Rome and Palestine, as well as from Florentine literature and more recent history.  These beautifully told stories were intended to entertain as well as to instruct husband and wife, their servants, children and visitors.

This exhibition is the first in the UK to explore this important and neglected art form of Renaissance Florence.  The exhibition is focused around two of The Courtauld’s great treasures:  the pair of chests ordered in 1472 by the Florentine Lorenzo Morelli to celebrate his marriage with Vaggia Nerli. These are the only pair of cassoni to be still displayed with their painted backboards (spalliere).The unusual survival of both the chests and their commissioning documents enables a full examination of this remarkable commission.

The Courtauld cassoni are displayed alongside other superb examples of chests and panels. Discover the stories behind these chests and gain rich insights into Florentine art and life at the height of the city’s glory.

Cassone

ca. 1425–50

Italian (Tuscany, Florence or Siena)

Cassone is the term given to large decorated chests made in Italy from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Next to the marriage bed, cassoni were cherished in wealthy Renaissance households, for they held clothing, precious fabrics, and other valuables. Often commissioned by the groom in marriage, a cassone was prominently carried in the nuptial procession, laden with the dowry of his new bride. In the fifteenth century, whole workshops were given over to the manufacture and decoration of cassoni.

Italian Renaissance workshops produced cassone front panels painted with episodes from classical or biblical history and mythology, evidently felicitous narratives for the newly married. Other cassone designs featured ornamental and figural carvings and inlays of various kinds, as in this splendid example from the Robert Lehman Collection. This cassone is embellished with a pattern of facing eagles, two armorial shields referencing the families united in marriage, and a fleurs-de-lis motif on the sides. These raised decorations were modeled in gesso on the wooden base with the use of a mold and then gilded.

https://artmuseum.mtholyoke.edu/object/wedding-chest-cassone-painted-panel-showing-death-lucretia

A cassone (plural cassoni) or marriage chest is a rich and showy Italian type of chest, which may be inlaid or carved, prepared with gesso ground then painted and gilded. Pastiglia was decoration in low relief carved or moulded in gesso, and was very widely used. The cassone ("large chest") was one of the trophy furnishings of rich merchants and aristocrats in Italian culture, from the Late Middle Ages onward. The cassone was the most important piece of furniture of that time. It was given to a bride and placed in the bridal suite. It would be given to the bride during the wedding, and it was the bride's parents' contribution to the wedding.

There are in fact a variety of different terms used in contemporary records for chests, and the attempts by modern scholars to distinguish between them remain speculative, and all decorated chests are today usually called cassoni, which was probably not the case at the time. For example, a forziere probably denoted a decorated chest with a lock.[1]

Since a cassone contained the personal goods of the bride, it was a natural vehicle for painted decoration commemorating the marriage in heraldry and, when figural painted panels began to be included in the decor from the early quattrocento, flattering allegory. The side panels offered a flat surface for a suitable painting, with subjects drawn from courtly romance or, much less often, religious subjects. By the 15th century subjects from classical mythology or history became the most popular. Great Florentine artists of the 15th century were called upon to decorate cassoni, though as Vasari complains, by his time in the 16th century, artists thought such work beneath them. Some Tuscan artists in Siena and Florence specialized in such cassone panels, which were preserved as autonomous works of art by 19th century collectors and dealers, who sometimes discarded the cassone itself. From the late 1850s, neo-Renaissance cassoni were confected for dealers like William Blundell Spence, Stefano Bardini or Elia Volpi in order to present surviving cassone panels to clients in a more "authentic" and glamorous presentation.[2]

A typical place for such a cassone was in a chamber at the foot of a bed that was enclosed in curtains. Such a situation is a familiar setting for depictions of the Annunciation or the Visitation of St. Anne to the Virgin Mary. A cassone was largely immovable. In a culture where chairs were reserved for important personages, often pillows scattered upon the floor of a chamber provided informal seating, and a cassone could provide both a backrest and a table surface. The symbolic "humility" that modern scholars read into Annunciations where the Virgin sits reading upon the floor, perhaps underestimates this familiar mode of seating.

At the end of the 15th century, a new classicising style arose, and early Renaissance cassoni of central and northern Italy were carved and partly gilded, and given classical décor, with panels flanked by fluted corner pilasters, under friezes and cornices, or with sculptural panels in high or low relief. Some early to mid-sixteenth-century cassoni drew their inspiration from Roman sarcophagi (illustration, right). By the mid-sixteenth century Giorgio Vasari could remark on the old-fashioned cassoni with painted scenes, examples of which could be seen in the palazzi of Florentine families.[3]

A cassone that has been provided with a high panelled back and sometimes a footrest, for both hieratic and practical reasons, becomes a cassapanca ("chest-bench"). Cassapanche were immovably fixed in the main public room of a palazzo, the sala or salone. They were part of the immobili ("unmoveables"), perhaps even more than the removable glazed window casements, and might be left in place, even if the palazzo passed to another family.