Panel from a Cassone: The Race of the Palio in the Streets of Florence (1418): Art, History and Details

Panel from a Cassone: The Race of the Palio in the Streets of Florence (1418) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Giovanni Francesco Toscani (Italian, c. 1380–1430).

The work and its context

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

A cassone was a wooden chest used for the storage of clothing, an essential piece of furniture in Italian homes during the Renaissance and often produced in matched sets. The cassone was often made on the occasion of a marriage and elaborately decorated with painted scenes and gilded moldings. This panel comes from such a painted cassone. It was not uncommon for the painted decoration to represent a memorable event at the time of the marriage. This scene depicts the end of the Palio, a horse race held in the streets of Florence on the Feast of John the Baptist (June 24). The panel from the other side of the cassone is now preserved in the Bargello Museum in Florence and shows the procession of the Palii banners before the race. The cassone commemorates a wedding between members of the Fini and Aldobrandini families in 1418.

Object facts

• Title: Panel from a Cassone: The Race of the Palio in the Streets of Florence
• Date: 1418
• Creator attribution: Giovanni Francesco Toscani (Italian, c. 1380–1430)
• Culture: Italy, Florence
• Type: Painting
• Technique: tempera and gold on wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 46.5 x 143.5 x 7 cm (18 5/16 x 56 1/2 x 2 3/4 in.); Unframed: 42.1 x 139.5 cm (16 9/16 x 54 15/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Medieval Art
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1916.801

Collection credit

Holden Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Rubinstein-Bloch, Stella. Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings, Etc. Presented by Mrs. Liberty E. Holden to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1917.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Louise d' Argencourt, and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 1. European Paintings before 1500. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.

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.