The Other Liberale in the House

The Other Liberale in the House

Note the cassone ›under the Cima St. Sebastian in the background
(picture: itatti.harvard.edu)

The connoisseurship of Renaissance cassoni means to put the pieces together: pieces of informations on profane and sometimes remote subjects from literature, on provenance, but also and literally: the pieces of cassone painting, dispersed all over the world, and brought together today rather in virtual reconstructions. Mattia Vinco, who also provided a contribution to the monumental catalogue of the Berenson Collection in Villa I Tatti (edited by Carl Brandom Strehlke and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls in 2015), now offers his catalogue monograph of cassone pictures from Verona.

(Picture: officinalibraria.net)

Under the Cima St. Sebastian »near the director’s office« in Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, stands a cassone. But no one paid much attention to it, as Joseph Connors (2002-2010 director of the center) remarks in a 2016 article, reviewing and heralding the catalogue to the Berenson Collection.

»It always seemed just an old wooden box enlivened by a talented restorer. A fascinating entry by Mattia Vinco shows that the roundels on the front were painted by Liberale da Verona. Aged and covered with grime, the scenes seem illegible at first, but in the entry they are coaxed out of the darkness into wonderful depictions of Apollo’s Pursuit of Daphne and the Marriage of Apollo and Daphne. That marriage should be the outcome of this notorious chase might seem strange, although Ovid intimates marriage (»Phoebus … cupit conubia«; Metamorphoses I.490), and the verses called La Complainte del amant from Jean Froissart’s L’Espinette amoreuse of circa 1370 provide a source close to home. Here we have not only a new work by Liberale but also the only cassone by his hand to survive intact: a complete surprise and a real discovery.«

That now has to be seen next to the ›other Liberale in the house‹, a cassone fragment (some ›onlookers‹), whose ›companion pieces‹ (the beautiful lady, about to lose a game of chess, and some other, male and female onlookers, gathered as partizans on the left and on the right; see large picture above and small picture on the right; and a scene apparently showing the ›eye contact‹ of two young lovers; see the virtual reconstruction of all three scenes here) are now in the Metroplitan Museum of Art. For everyone wanting to know more details, photos of this or other Liberale ›in the house‹, especially the roundels that we don’t give here, and a full survey of dispersed works and informations, we recommend to look into Vinco’s catalogue monograph that focusses on the especially rich cassone heritage of Verona and is the result of many years of laborious work ›in the tracks‹ of the pioneers of cassone connoisseurship (Paul Schubring and others).

Mattia Vinco, Cassoni. Pittura profana del Rinascimento a Verona, Milano 2018.

For cassone painting see also here; and for another piece of the Berenson Collection see here.

BB conversing with guest in 1955 (picture: icp.org; Chim (David Seymour)

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