Cassone (early 1500s): Art, History and Details

Cassone (early 1500s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

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..

Object facts

• Title: Cassone
• Date: early 1500s
• Culture: Italy, early 16th century
• Type: Furniture and woodwork
• Technique: walnut, painted and gilded
• Dimensions: Overall: 54.3 x 168.3 x 51.6 cm (21 3/8 x 66 1/4 x 20 5/16 in.)
• Collection: Furniture
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1939.189

Collection credit

Gift of Leonard C. Hanna Jr., for the Coralie Walker Hanna Memorial Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Milliken, William. "The Coralie Walker Hanna Memorial Collection Gift of Leonard C Hanna." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 26, no. 6 (June 1939): 84-115

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.