Fig. 119. Francesco Pesellino. Cassone Front. Triumphs of Love, Chastity, and Death.—Mrs. John L. Gardner, Boston.
We have in the New York Historical Society the superb salver, Figure [119a], which was prepared against the birth of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Appropriately it shows knights acclaiming fame. The date is 1448, the painter of the school of Domenico Veneziano.
We often see the Queen of Sheba reverently approaching Solomon. It is the admonition that a young bride should seek wisdom. Battles and Roman triumphs are tediously common. They set a mark of valor for the bridegroom. Wedding Feasts are almost tautological on a bride-chest, but they afford charming pictures of the Florence that amused itself.
Fig. 119a.> Follower of Domenico Veneziano, perhaps Baldovinetti. Triumph of Fame. Birth Salver for Lorenzo de’ Medici.—N. Y. Historical Society.
Mythology often dignifies these painted stories, the reference being generally to that beauty which is institutional in brides. Thus we have in a spalliera panel in the Fogg Museum the Judgment of Paris, with the competing goddesses more modestly clothed than Ovid’s record justifies. The work is possibly an exceptionally amiable product of Cosimo Rosselli, and the date may be about 1475. The Rape of Helen, which was of course due to her fatal beauty, is a common if unedifying subject for bride-chests. So is Actæon torn by the hounds of the Divine Huntress for his temerity in surprising Diana at her bath. A delightful panel in the possession of Mr. Martin Ryerson at Chicago recounts in many episodes the adventures of Ulysses from his escape from Polyphemus to his home-coming at Ithaca. The dalliances of the much-experienced wanderer are by no means concealed, but at least the scene opens with prominent display of the episode most creditable to him as a married man, the baffling of the Sirens, and closes with the exemplary figure of constant Penelope weaving her interminable web.
Fig. 120. Bartolommeo di Giovanni under Botticelli’s direction. Nastagio degli Onesti’s Feast. Spalliera panel.—Spiridon Coll., Paris.
In furniture painting we are generally in the realm of comedy. But we touch pathos in Boccaccio’s story of patient Griselda, at Bergamo, Modena, and elsewhere; while we approach tragedy in the many versions of chaste Susanna assailed and traduced by the elders, and attain to notable melodrama in Boccaccio’s grim vision of the spirit lover eternally harrying the miserable ghost of his merciless lady through the pine wood of Ravenna. The best of these panels is in the Spiridon Collection, Paris. The ghostly scene of the chase takes place before the picnic party, Figure [120], artfully arranged by Nastagio degli Onesti to prove to his unfeeling lady that there is a penalty in the next world for being too cruel to a lover in this. The lesson Boccaccio tells us was effective, and they lived happily together ever afterwards. The panel was designed by Botticelli and painted by his assistant, Bartolommeo di Giovanni, for the wedding of a Bini groom and a Pucci bride in the year 1487.