Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence: The Courtauld Wedding Chests

Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence explores an important but historically neglected art form. Cassoni are pairs of chests that were lavishly decorated with precious metals and elaborate paintings and were often the most expensive of a whole suite of decorative objects commissioned to celebrate marriage alliances between powerful families in Renaissance Florence.

Cassoni were displayed in the husband's chamber and were used to store precious clothes and textiles. The painted panels set into them told tales and history from ancient Greece, Rome, and Palestine, as well as from Florentine literature and more recent history. These pictorial narratives were intended to entertain as well as to instruct the household and its visitors.

This book reflects the extensive iconographic range of cassone painting. Its focus, however, is around a 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 art form.

Caroline Campbell is Schroder Foundation Curator of Paintings at the Courtauld Gallery, London.