Love and Marriage is some wedding present

5 April 2012

The art critic is not much liked by the society he has to keep if he does not hold the view that his is the best of all possible worlds and in it, all is for the best. Art institutions view him as a whipper-in, the equivalent of a street hawker or circus barker, the essential tool of an economy based on hordes of visitors. Art curators have it that his duty is to offer enthusiastic and unquestioning support to their scholarship and whim. Press and public relations officers tell him what to think and offer him propaganda as reliable information. All that the critic has to do, it seems, is do as he is told.

I, however, after the recent sequence of damnable exhibitions devoted to Van Dyck, Picasso, Sickert and, now, the elaborate 15th-century furniture of the Florentine Renaissance palazzo, am convinced that the critic has three simple duties to himself and his readers. First, and most important, he must tell the truth as he sees it, no matter what his limitations. Second, he must make judgments of quality, and for these his tools are connoisseurship and a visual memory. And to perform these duties, his third is to sift all the excitements, delusions and assertions of the academic and the propagandist through the mesh of scepticism that is his first defence against the follies that others would impose on him, for without informed scepticism, he becomes their dupe.

In the case of the Courtauld Wedding Chests, the reasonable subtitle of the latest exhibition at the Courtauld Institute — of which the too audacious lead title is Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence — the folly lies not in the scholarship, for that is impeccable, but in the institute’s supposing that five wedding chests and five related panels are enough to make an exhibition that will seduce, enchant and inform the hordes who raven after culture.

At this very moment, the Metropolitan Museum in New York is dismantling an exhibition called Art and Love in Renaissance Italy in which 15 times as many objects were too few to cover the subject. In this, though a brief chapter in the substantial catalogue is devoted to the wedding chest — for which the Italian cassone (plural cassoni) is the common international term — only one example of a complete chest was on view, together with a handful of detached painted panels, but then the exhibition’s scope was much wider than the sexual and moral virtues of the Florentines suggested by the Courtauld scholars, reaching far beyond chaste marriage into erotica and frank pornography. The narrow focus of the Courtauld exhibition and its catalogue isolates and encompasses almost all that need be said of the cassone and its importance in the practical and symbolic business of the dynastic marriage of its time. The far wider focus of the New York exhibition, however, set the cassone in a larger context and illustrated with compelling force that it may well, in some cases, have had a secondary and masturbatory purpose in the sense that, painted on the inside of the lid, we occasionally find a recumbent female nude inviting to the gaze of men, revealed only when the lid is lifted. Such images can surely have had no relevance to the virgin bride.

The cassone, in its simplest form, was a handsomely large chest in which clothes or, more probably, fine bed linen was kept; closed, it could be used as a bench or even as a page’s bed, though too narrow for a restless sleeper. In its most ornate forms it was, as it were, an example of model architecture with a general resemblance to the sarcophagi of antique Rome, but in timber, coloured and gilded, its architectural elements framing paintings that, in continuous narrative, told tales of marital virtue, rectitude and fortitude, borrowed from classical sources or the novellas of the day. These were constructed by specialist craftsmen and the finest and most expensive were objects of extraordinary extravagance that played a ritual role in furnishing the room in which, among its many public and other private purposes, the sexual conjugation of a man and his new bride almost ceremonially took place. Their decoration and their message were reflected and enhanced in related panels set above them as friezes in the panelling, though we seem largely uncertain of the height at which these were set (the term for these is spalliere).

Very few cassoni, if any, survive intact. The Courtauld has an exceedingly grand pair, but even these are far from perfect, for instead of standing on a low dais a few inches high, they have been given lions’ feet that belong to a 19th-century reconstruction for which there is no authority; far worse, their lids cannot be fully opened because their related spalliere have, with hideous butchery, been incorporated as backboards. In many other cases the narrative panels were removed to make, under ambitious attributions, new lives as wholly independent paintings (though their narrow horizontal format always gives them away) — not a clever thing to do, for as paintings these are of far worse than secondary quality, lagging well behind their times in terms of the history of Florentine art. At a glance it is clear that their mastery of perspective and proportion is primitive, and were one to make a direct comparison of the paintings of military prowess that embellish the Courtauld pair, which can be firmly dated 1472, with the figures and horsemen in the middle distance of the altarpiece by the Pollaiuolo brothers in the National Gallery, The Martyrdom of St Sebastian, completed in 1475, their naivety is little short of ludicrous. In many cases we must also take into account the worn condition of such panels for, as once the most forward parts of furniture in daily use, kicked by the heels of the careless using them as seats, and scuffed and scraped by generations of maids rummaging among their contents, these are panels that demanded extensive restoration that fudged and blurred narratives that once had modest charm in their detailed unreality. As for the carcasses of most 15th-century cassoni, their history is one of deconstruction, reconstruction, amalgamation, reinvention, ambitious improvement and downright forgery to satisfy the sudden interest that developed among connoisseurs and collectors in the middle of the 19th century and lasted for a hundred years or so. That it is now revived is no more than an indication that all the richer pickings have been taken by earlier students of art history in hope of a PhD.

The exhibition catalogue, largely by Caroline Campbell, is indeed based on her PhD research. A model of curatorial investigation, it is what all museum and gallery catalogues should be and is supported by the academic apparatus that is now so often and lazily discarded even by national institutions. I lavish on it unreserved praise that is not deserved by the exhibition itself. This, alas, is in the small and gloomy room that the institute deludes itself is suitable and adequate for exhibitions — it is not and never will be.

On entering it, I was confronted by the sight of two elderly women kneeling on the floor and two others with their buttocks in the air, all suffering these discomforts because the cassoni are displayed at roughly the level at which they first stood in their renaissance palaces and are dimly lit in general and obscured by cast shadows in particular.

As an aside, I ask how the original owners, grandees all, read these moral tales, for their various episodes are designed to be read in sequence in much the same way as we now read strip cartoons, and the feasts of detail demand a close and comfortable eye. Were their first owners too compelled to sink to their knees? This is not an easy exhibition for any visitor, and it seems odd that the Courtauld Institute, the mother and father of art history in Britain, spawning curators by the dozen, should care so little for the presentation of exhibitions, their light and air, their scale and purpose, and the comfort of their visitors.

For those curious to know more of the cassone and the spalliera, and more of the furnishing and setting of which they were part, Yale University Press has made the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum exhibition available in Britain, Andrea Bayer its editor, Art and Love in Renaissance Italy its title (£40). The subject is yet further extended in another book from Yale, Art, Marriage and Family, by Jacqueline Marie Musacchio (£35). With nearly 600 illustrations between them, they offer extraordinary evidence of almost every aspect of daily life among the wealthy Florentines (and others) in the 15th century. As the Florentines were notorious for the practice of homosexual sodomy, it is surprising that the Courtauld catalogue makes no mention of it and the hypocrisy of the admonition to be virtuous, embodied in the decoration of the wedding chest; the subject, but not the hypocrisy, is raised in the New York catalogue. These books may at first seem weighed down with scholarship, but it is not so heavy as to deter the amateur. They are very good; in their distillation of facts they are the new fundamental source books, the compendia to which every student of history and art history should first turn for information on the social rituals and associated furniture and artefacts of the wealthy Italian Renaissance household.

I have little doubt that any lady
novelist could have woven a more entertaining tale around these wedding chests, so too some chattering expert on the Antiques Roadshow, even that they might inspire a worldly bishop to wax theological about the sacrament of marriage; for me, however, cassoni belong, not to the history of art (though its disciplines are readily applied to them), but to the histories of furniture and forgery. The histories of architecture, sculpture and painting, of landscape and linear and aerial perspective, of anatomy and the human form, of the real and the fantastic, were not one inch advanced by the craftsmen who made them. They are monstrous trivialities.

Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence is at the Courtauld Institute (020 7848 2526, www.courtauld.ac.uk) until 17 May. Daily 10am-5.30pm. Admission £5 (includes entry to permanent collection); free Mondays 10am-2pm.

The Triumph Of Marriage: Florentine Renaissance Cassoni
The Courtauld Gallery
Somerset House, Strand, WC2R 0RN

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