Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Exhibitions: Activities
3D Cassone Model
Part of the exhibition: Beauty and Duty: The Art and Business of Renaissance Marriage
Description: A cassone was a large wooden wedding chest used in 15th-century Italy. These marriage chest, which could be six feet long, were often decorated on the front and sides with colorful paintings of love stories or heroic battles. The expensive wooden chests held the bride's possessions. They were proudly displayed in the procession of the bride through the streets of the city to her new home.
Bowdoin's cassone painting of the Nymphs of Fiesole has been set into this reconstruction of a chest to show how it once may have looked. The hinged top of the cassone opens to show the textile pattern that was often painted inside the lid of a chest.
