If you were to witness the celebrations of an Italian Renaissance marriage, you might see a pair of trunks, elaborately and elegantly adorned and engraved, carried through the meandering streets of an Italian village amid the music, pomp, and golden glow of a wedding procession. These trunks or chests—called “cassoni”—were among the married couple’s most important and treasured possessions. We can see certain ideals of marriage reflected in them.
Cassoni were generally commissioned in pairs, and they might include the coats of arms from the bride and groom’s families. Renaissance marriages were, in part, a unification of various houses, and often had political and economic implications. Families often used arranged marriages to build bonds.
As the Frist Art Museum puts it, “They were regarded as an alliance between two families who were usually of similar economic, social, and political standing.” The two chests bearing two coats-of-arms but put into the same bedchamber symbolized the union of houses. The chests were paraded from the bride’s home to her husband’s residence, perhaps signifying her passage from her father’s authority to her husband’s.
"Stories of Alatiel (Wedding Feast)," between 1400 and 1424, by Appolonio di Giovanni. Oil on panel; 18 1/10 inches by 61 4/5 inches. Museo Correr, Venice. Public Domain
Beauty and Utility
The pair of chests served a couple of purposes in the bedroom. These chests were both practical pieces of furniture and exquisite works of art. The bride’s chest contained her linen, clothes, and other elements of her dowry, which her soon-to-be husband and father negotiated upon the couple’s engagement. The bedchamber was the center of the upper-class woman’s life, the heart of the home, and the place where she displayed prized possessions, like her cassoni.
They usually featured intricate decorations like depictions from mythology or the work of Italian poets Petrarch, Boccaccio, or Dante. These scenes were expressed either through paint, relief carvings in wood or gesso, or gold gilding. The delicate figures dancing across the chest between fruit and foliage usually told stories of love and fertility or communicated wisdom about marriage. The allusions to classical and poetic tradition allowed the couple to express their refinement and rootedness in tradition.
The Frist Art Museum comments, “Erudite subject matter demonstrates the patron’s sophistication and sometimes has familial or civic significance as well. ... To create meaningful connections between the past and the present, ancient tales are set in Renaissance settings with figures wearing the latest fashions.” All this made the cassoni delightful in the eyes of their owners, who were eager to display these prestigious furnishings in the heart of their household. The chests were even designed to match the other furniture.
Cassone Front, late 14th century. Wood, gilt stucco; 19 inches by 61 3/4 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Public Domain
Creating Cassoni
Just as Tuscany was the center of activity for the poets whose works adorned the cassoni, so too was it the main manufacturing hub for the chests. Great artists who worked on marriage chests included Francesco di Giorgio Martini and the Florentine artists Giovanni di Ser Giovanni Guidi, Sandro Botticelli, Paolo Uccello, and Donatello.
One intact cassone at the Metropolitan Museum of Art gleams with the burnished glint of gesso relief that shows fauns, centaurs, and groves of trees arrayed around a chariot pulled by dragons and containing the goddess Ceres. The inconsolable Ceres is in search of her abducted daughter Prosperina. It’s a scene taken from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and was likely paired with a scene on the now-lost companion chest, which would have told the beginning of the story: Pluto, god of the underworld, kidnapped Prosperina as she was gathering flowers, and stole her away to his cold, bitter kingdom underground, where she became the pale queen of the dead.
Marriage chest (cassone), 1480–1495. Poplar wood; painted and gilded gesso; 38 1/2 inches by 81 inches by 32 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Metropolitan Museum of Art
Looking at the figures on the cassone, one absorbs the impression of a faded world of glory, magic, and heartbreak. The wild world of luscious myth, crystallized in a gold-colored carving is like a butterfly in amber. It unites us with the wild world of Renaissance Italy and the unknown couple who carried the terrible beauty of this chest into their new life together.
In Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Duke Thesus speaks of his wedding to Hippolyta as one “with pomp, with triumph, and with reveling.” This seems to be very much the spirit of upper-class Italian Renaissance marriages. In fact, wedding processions of the time, in which cassoni were featured, were modelled on military parades called “triumphs” dating at least as far back as to the Romans, as seen in the imagery on the cassoni by Apollonio di Giovanni called “Triumph of Scipio Africanus.”
While the wedding itself took place in a solemn church ceremony the subsequent celebration spilled over into other areas in jubilation. In addition to processions, a marriage’s extensive festivities—which often lasted for days— featured spectacles, performances, meals, games, and poetry. The wedding poems, called “epithalamia,” spoke in rivulets of word-music about the purposes of marriage, including the perpetuation of the social order and the institutions that sustained it.
Cassones came in many styles and levels of detail. This cassone's interior lid has a painted scene from a garden, where twin parrots perch on bouquets in mirrored vases. Public Domain
In the center of all this were the large marriage chests, planted, immovably in the bedchamber. We might view the chest as a beautiful expression of a marriage itself: a work of careful craftsmanship and hard work, stable and enduring, rooted in family and tradition, holding within it innumerable treasures.
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Walker Larson
Author
Prior to becoming a freelance journalist and culture writer, Walker Larson taught literature and history at a private academy in Wisconsin, where he resides with his wife and daughter. He holds a master's in English literature and language, and his writing has appeared in The Hemingway Review, Intellectual Takeout, and his Substack, The Hazelnut. He is also the author of two novels, "Hologram" and "Song of Spheres."
