Marriage chest (cassone) ca. 1480–95 Italian, Florence or Lucca Italian inventories and descriptions of Renaissance-period households document the importance of great chests in the main bedchamber, or camera. This room was the center of an upper-class woman's existence, as she was encouraged to live mostly indoors and to avoid lingering at open windows or in the semipublic courtyard of the family house.[1] In this chamber she would proudly display the cradle she had been given on her marriage and also wedding chests, or cassone, containing her trousseau.[2]The finest fifteenth-century cassoni

Marriage chest (cassone) ca. 1480–95 Italian, Florence or Lucca Italian inventories and descriptions of Renaissance-period households document the importance of great chests in the main bedchamber, or camera. This room was the center of an upper-class woman's existence, as she was encouraged to live mostly indoors and to avoid lingering at open windows or in the semipublic courtyard of the family house.[1] In this chamber she would proudly display the cradle she had been given on her marriage and also wedding chests, or cassone, containing her trousseau.[2]The finest fifteenth-century cassoni were decorated with panel paintings or with intarsia inlay (see acc. nos. and ) or, like the example discussed here, with scenes in pastiglia, a variety of gesso relief applied in layers and painted or gilded. Later, in the sixteenth century, many were embellished with relief carving, usually in walnut (see acc. no. ). Hunts and jousts were sometimes shown on these chests, but the most popular subjects were mythological tales of love and fertility. Their immodesty fired the reformer Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) to exhort the Florentines to choose more uplifting themes-from the lives of the saints, for example.[3] But the cassoni workshops produced what was in demand, and romantic tales of the loves of the gods continued to subject on the front of this cassone is taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses.[4] The distraught earth goddess Ceres is seen riding in her dragon-yoked chariot, her torch kindled from the fires of Mount Etna, through a fairy-tale forest inhabited by satyrs, in search of her abducted daughter, Proserpina. In her distress, Ceres has allowed the crops to fail, leaving humankind to starve. According to Paul Schubring, the Museum's chest had a companion piece, now lost but formerly in the collection of the Palazzo Guinigi in Lucca.[5] The relief on the front of that cassone illustrated the beginning of the story, in which Pluto, god of t

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