Cassone
Unknown Artist
early 1500s
Medium
walnut, painted and gilded
Dimensions
54.3 × 168.3 × 51.6 cm
Classification
Furniture and woodwork
Department
Decorative Art and Design
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
Gift of Leonard C. Hanna Jr., for the Coralie Walker Hanna Memorial Collection
Accession Number
1939.189
About this artwork
Chests such as this were made in pairs and presented to young women on the occasion of their marriage. They not only provided storage space in the home for clothing and personal effects, but could also be used as a bench to sit on. It was not uncommon for any one room in a Renaissance palace to have several. This chest was in Savoy Castle, near Verzuolo, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy from the 1500s until 1922..