The Adimari Cassone
Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, called Lo Scheggia (1406 to 1486) · about 1450
A wedding procession crosses the panel in front of you, and it is the most vivid picture of everyday Florentine life to survive from the fifteenth century. Couples in extravagant dress dance beneath a striped canopy in a piazza; trumpeters blow their long instruments, servants carry gifts, and behind them rises a building that is unmistakably the Baptistery of Florence with the cathedral beside it. The long, low format tells you what this was: the front of a cassone, a marriage chest given to a bride to hold her trousseau, or more likely a spalliera panel set into the wall above it.
Look at the clothes. The women wear gowns with enormous sleeves lined in fur and patterned in gold brocade, their hair bound in tall headdresses; the men wear short doublets and coloured hose, one leg red and one white. The painter, Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, was the younger brother of the great Masaccio and made his living on precisely this kind of decorative work; his nickname, Lo Scheggia, means the splinter. He gives the scene bright colours, clear outlines and an almost documentary attention to fabrics, which is why historians of costume treasure it. The perspective is naive, but the crowd is full of life.
The panel was long thought to record the wedding of Boccaccio Adimari and Lisa Ricasoli in fourteen twenty, and the name has stuck, though the date of the painting is later and the connection uncertain. It entered the Academy collection in the nineteenth century. In a museum of altarpieces and marble giants it stands out as a glimpse of the streets, and it hangs close to Botticelli in the first room, so give it a few minutes on the way in.
Did You Know? The painter's nickname, Lo Scheggia, means the splinter or the chip, and he was the younger brother of Masaccio.
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