Mythology often dignifies these painted stories, the reference being
generally to that beauty which is institutional in brides. Thus we have
in a _spalliera_ panel in the Fogg Museum the Judgment of Paris, with
the competing goddesses more modestly clothed than Ovid’s record
justifies. The work is possibly an exceptionally amiable product of
Cosimo Rosselli, and the date may be about 1475. The Rape of Helen,
which was of course due to her fatal beauty, is a common if unedifying
subject for bride-chests. So is Actæon torn by the hounds of the Divine
Huntress for his temerity in surprising Diana at her bath. A delightful
panel in the possession of Mr. Martin Ryerson at Chicago recounts in
many episodes the adventures of Ulysses from his escape from Polyphemus
to his home-coming at Ithaca. The dalliances of the much-experienced
wanderer are by no means concealed, but at least the scene opens with
prominent display of the episode most creditable to him as a married
man, the baffling of the Sirens, and closes with the exemplary figure of
constant Penelope weaving her interminable web.
[Illustration:
FIG. 120. Bartolommeo di Giovanni under Botticelli’s direction.
Nastagio degli Onesti’s Feast. Spalliera panel.—_Spiridon Coll.,
Paris._
]
In furniture painting we are generally in the realm of comedy. But we
touch pathos in Boccaccio’s story of patient Griselda, at Bergamo,
Modena, and elsewhere; while we approach tragedy in the many versions of
chaste Susanna assailed and traduced by the elders, and attain to
notable melodrama in Boccaccio’s grim vision of the spirit lover
eternally harrying the miserable ghost of his merciless lady through the
pine wood of Ravenna. The best of these panels is in the Spiridon
Collection, Paris. The ghostly scene of the chase takes place before the
picnic party, Figure 120, artfully arranged by Nastagio degli Onesti to
prove to his unfeeling lady that there is a penalty in the next world
for being too cruel to a lover in this. The lesson Boccaccio tells us
was effective, and they lived happily together ever afterwards. The
panel was designed by Botticelli and painted by his assistant,
Bartolommeo di Giovanni, for the wedding of a Bini groom and a Pucci
bride in the year 1487.
With it we take leave of Florentine furniture painting, an art too
unpretentious to be considered at length in a general survey, yet too
charming in itself and too representative of the heyday of Florentine
wealth and gayety to be wholly neglected.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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