These two chests, which are identical in shape, size and decoration, are two rare surviving examples of luxury 15th century furniture. They are richly decorated in relief covered in gold leaf reproducing elegant plant tendrils very similar to those found on numerous Classical sarcophagi.<\/p>\n
Chests were one of the chief items of domestic furniture in the Renaissance and were used to store clothing and linen, but also money and valuables such as jewellery and books. A custom dating back to the Middle Ages required that a bride be given a pair of chests on her wedding day to contain her trousseau, and indeed wealthier families often commissioned richly decorated chests for such occasions.<\/p>\n
According to a local tradition, the Pinacoteca\u2019s two wedding chests were given by Galeotto Manfredi, the lord of Faenza, to his lover Cassandra, a native of Ferrara, when she withdrew to live a cloistered life in Faenza in 1480 in the Convent of San Maglorio, which is where the chests were kept until 1867. We do not know who made the chests, but recent scholarship has suggested that they may be the work of Master Jacopo da Faenza, a skilled woodcarver who worked chiefly in Venice in the last quarter of the 15th century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2721,"template":"","tag-opera":[],"tecnica":[70,71,72],"class_list":["post-2813","opera","type-opera","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tecnica-carved-wood","tecnica-gesso-pastiglia","tecnica-gilding"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opera\/2813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opera"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/opera"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/opera\/2813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"tag-opera","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tag-opera?post=2813"},{"taxonomy":"tecnica","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinacotecafaenza.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tecnica?post=2813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}