Parading their virtues

In painted chests and wedding processions, tales of Renaissance love and mores

December 19, 2008|Sebastian Smee, Globe Staff

Pity the poor boy: stripped naked, tied up, blindfolded, made to kneel, prodded by the horns of beasts, beaten, and roundly abused.

Then again, we are told he deserved no better: "An ill-tempered soul," was how the Greek poet Moschus described Eros: "A voice of honey, but a heart of gall; boorish, deceitful, an inveterate liar, fond of childish pranks and cruel practical jokes."

Is it just me, or is this a case of too much protesting? Eros - or Cupid, the Roman version of the god - was, after all, pretty cute. He crops up several times in an exquisite show at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum called "The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance." The show, put together by Cristelle Baskins, takes a hard look at paintings that adorned wedding chests, called cassoni, in 15th-century Tuscany.

The paintings, all horizontal in format, number less than a dozen. But they brim with human actors in resplendent costumes, as well as jewel-like depictions of animals, landscapes, and architecture.

Even for those well versed in the history of art, however, these paintings test one's mettle. They illustrate stories and allegories, many of which now seem obscure; they are full of didactic content that can seem strange and at times downright off-putting; and they were made with purposes in mind that need a good deal of explaining.

Don't be put off: The show comes with a free brochure that summarizes the content of each painting in four or five crisp sentences. It's also accompanied by a splendid catalog, with clear introductory essays by Baskins and three of her colleagues. What's more, the show coincides with "Art and Love in Renaissance Italy," an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that examines similar subject matter, though with a much wider purview.

Up until about 1460, important weddings in Italy were commonly marked with a procession from the bride's home to her new husband's. Not only was the bride herself paraded, but her possessions, too. These would be carried in a chest whose panels were painted with images intended to instruct, as well as delight and divert.

Many of them invite subtle and even contradictory interpretations, affirming traditional female virtues like chastity and modesty on the one hand while inciting desire on the other. But in Francesco di Giorgio's "Triumph of Chastity," the message is difficult to miss; it reads, indeed, like a rather brutal threat.