Cassoni experience renaissance all their own

    Wealthy families in Renaissance Italy often celebrated marriages with grand processions, including the parading of cassoni, marriage chests that were commissioned to be painted for the occasion. The parades, which led from the bride's house to her new home, were later criticized for their opulence and even banned in Florence in the 1460s. The painted cassoni, however, remained a lasting tradition and testament to the lavish marches, often decorated with scenes of parades, journeys and movement.
    Now, 15 cassone panels are on display in "Triumph of Marriage," a special exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The Gardner is a house museum, famous for its founder's eccentric display of valuable furniture, artworks and tapestries, left relatively unchanged since the early 1900s in the vibrant setting of a 15th-century Venetian palace.
    The guest curator of the show is Cristelle Baskins, an associate professor and chair of the art and art history department at Tufts, and this marks her first opportunity to curate an exhibition. The idea came out of a casual question asked by Alan Chong, curator of the collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, as to whether she would be interested in doing a show. That was six years ago, and it wasn't until 2005 that the collaboration between Baskins and Chong began to take shape.
    When planning an exhibition at a museum, the lead-up to the actual opening tends to be extensive, involving drawing up a loan list, designing the space and getting rights to images for the catalogue — which, in this case, is a full book.
 Baskins has worked on cassoni, an uncommon subject in Renaissance scholarship, for 25 years. In an interview with the Daily, she called the exhibition a "dream come true," considering the objects' obscurity in the realm of art history. "I could never have anticipated that cassoni would be of interest to the general public," she said. "When I worked on them as a graduate student, I was being discouraged left and right. I kept meeting people in Italy and New York, and they'd say, ‘Why in the world are you working on cassoni? You'll never get a job, you'll never be a success.'"
    Baskins' work on cassoni has been a bit of a fairy tale itself, as her successes seem to come every 10 years: She wrote her dissertation in 1988, published her first book on cassoni, "Cassone Painting, Humanism and Gender in Early Modern Italy," in 1998, and finally opened this exhibition in 2008.
    Baskins' success is remarkable, considering furniture paintings are not popular or well-known forms of Renaissance art. "People were really cautioning me that to succeed in the Renaissance, you had to pick a well-known established canonical master, and if I didn't do that I was just going to suffer the consequences," she said. "Well, I'm glad to report that I've done okay."
    The "Triumph of Marriage" show at the Gardner has unexpectedly found itself to be one in a line of similar exhibitions happening around the world. In 2006-2007, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London did an exhibition called "At Home in Renaissance Italy" which featured everything domestic from clothing and jewelry to furniture painting, including cassoni. This year, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art arranged "Beauty and Duty: The Art and Business of Renaissance Marriage;" later this month, the Metropolitan Museum in New York will open "Art and Love in Renaissance Italy," which will include about 10 cassone paintings; and next February "Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence: The Courtauld Wedding Chests," will open at the Courtauld Gallery in London. As Baskins put it, "The floodgates have opened."
    This surge of cassone exhibits implies a recent interest in moving away from the lofty objects made by Renaissance "geniuses" — all religious and political masterpieces. In these shows, the Renaissance gets domesticated, and museum visitors get pulled into the bedrooms and living rooms of ordinary Renaissance citizens.
    The Gardner show seeks to unify the panels according to their moralizing subject matter, revealing many standards and values related to marriage in 15th-century Italy. The title, "Triumph of Marriage," was inspired by a cassone from the Isabella Stewart Gardner collection, painted around 1450 by Francesco Pesellino, which depicts the "Triumphs of Petrarch," featuring images of love, chastity, death, fame, time and eternity. This particular piece reveals a larger theme in cassone paintings that the curators could work with: triumph. "The logic of the show is that there are some allegorical triumphs like Pesellino's Petrarchan triumphs, there are some ancient historical triumphs like all of the Etruscan and Roman triumphant generals, and there are a couple of scenes of contemporary 15th-century triumphs," Baskins explained.
    Viewers used to seeing canonical Renaissance works must look at cassone paintings with open minds, as they are crammed with detailed narratives and dynamic action that moves along the panel like a linear story. Processional imagery evokes a sense of nostalgia for the spectacle of marriage parades. The eye follows finely costumed figures as they march horizontally across imaginary landscapes, full of mountains and cliffs, towers and distant cities.
    Baskins often relates cassoni to the "slow food" movement. "Cassoni really demand slowing it all down," she said. "You have to really take your time and piece it out. It seems that they were also really good for their intended context, which would have been a bedroom, so it's something that you're going to see every day, and you don't get tired of them because every time you look, you see something new."
    She imagines these chests would have been made for a young bride, who would have been attracted first by their storybook charm. The paintings would then remain relevant, however, the familiar tales and images becoming referents throughout the stages of her life. With only 15 panels included and only 15 visitors allowed in the gallery at once, the exhibition facilitates this deep viewing experience, fostering close, gradual readings of the works.
    Despite the authentic viewing experience, these works are certainly taken out of context in the gallery — originally intended as decorations for furniture, they now hang at eye level on stark walls, defined as paintings, and if a visitor neglected to read the wall text, the mistake of approaching them as wall panels would be unavoidable. The only hint to their larger context of wooden chests is a simple rectangular cube in the center of the room, on which three panels from the same chest are mounted in their original placement.    
    "They didn't want to build a fake cassone in the middle of the room," Baskins explained. "It's almost impossible to borrow a complete cassone. They really got chopped up in the 19th century and sold to dealers, so it's not as though we didn't try to get one." The wall text does instruct visitors to continue upstairs in the museum to see the Gardner's permanent display, which includes intact cassoni in a more context-driven setting.
    The cassoni's subjects extend into literary contexts, and quotes from Petrarch, Camillus and Apulieus are painted on the walls. One in particular jumps out at viewers: "Even the most excellent painters exercised themselves in such labors, without being ashamed, as many would be today, to paint and gild such chests." The quotation comes from Giorgio Vasari, who in 1550 wrote "Lives of the Artists," a seminal text for biographies of great Italian artists. His quotation about cassoni seems to imply that furniture-painting was a shameful practice, but one must remember that he was writing about a time when decorative arts and fine arts were not distinct practices.
    Baskins explained, "He's trying to make the case to the Duke of Florence that artists are similar to poets, that they shouldn't have to belong to the guild; that they shouldn't be treated as artisans anymore, they should be treated as special individuals."
    Along with the exhibition, a fully illustrated catalogue, which Baskins considers the equivalent of a scholarly article, presents new information about cassoni and their uses. Overall, Baskins considers the exhibition a success, and said that the Gardner has reported high attendance numbers. "It's very gratifying that people are going," she said. "It's tremendous fun for me to be there in the gallery being inconspicuous. I see people looking together and they're pointing things out to each other, and I think that's the way it would have been in the 15th century, so I love the re-creation of the viewing experience."
    Educational programming connected with the show, featuring Baskins, occurs at least twice a week, and this weekend the Gardner will host a scholarly symposium for the exhibition which is free for students and will address the theme of triumph and issues brought up by the show. "The Triumph of Marriage: A Symposium on Renaissance Cassoni," chaired by Baskins, will include keynote lectures on Friday, beginning at 6:30 p.m., and a symposium followed by a reception on Saturday from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. For more information, visit the Gardner Museum's Web site, www.GardnerMuseum.org.