Guest Author - Christine MacNeil Sweet
Weddings have been on my mind lately, given my recent engagement that should surprise no one. So, in the vein of weddings and traditions, I was thinking about hope chests. In our culture, it is the bride who usually purchases the hope chest for herself or inherits it from a female member of the family. However, in fifteenth-century Italy, some historians have alleged that it was the groom who not only purchased it, but had it decoratively painted. Was it decorated with flowers and romantic scenes that his future bride would like? Not it was not. Many times the scenes upon these chests were of a military nature, depicting great battles of history from famous works of literature. Presumably these allegorical battle depictions were to give the bride hope that the man she was marrying was a great warrior.
I had the pleasure of seeing the detail of one of these chests in a 1997 catalog from the Seattle Art Museum. The mural is attributed to Paolo Uccello, a Florentine painter who lived from about 1397 through 1475. It is entitled Episodes from the Aeneid, and was done in 1460 about fifteen years before his death. The scene is amazing in its detail. The egg tempera colors used are gold, blacks and reds, with a splash of white in a stocking clad leg, shirt, or charging horse. To the left, the battle ships come to port under a flurry of horns and banners, disembarking their crew to fight with the forces already on land outside the walls of the city. They are being greeted by the King and members of his court. Reinforcements appear to be coming as far as the eye can see a legion of heads with spears raised far into the distance. Several of the invaders have already met their demise on the right, and others continue to fight in hand to hand combat with female soldiers or on horseback.
Most recently, this work has been interpreted to be not one continuous, but three separate scenes taken from Virgil’s Aeneid. The mural was to be viewed as three separate stories: the left side depicting the greeting of King Evander, Pallas, and the court by Aneas and Achates. In the center - a depiction of a feast being prepared to honor Hercules and on the far right is a depiction of the battle between the Amazons (that explains the soldiers in dresses) and the Trojans.
Not for the commoner, a cassone graced the houses of the aristocracy and the merchant class. It was a prestigious object made for the bridal chamber and placed at the foot of the bed. Once in place, it was so large and heavy as to be immovable, often measuring more than five feet in length and crafted out of solid wood. Today, a hope chest is not quite as large, not quite as grand, and has fallen somewhat out of favor with modern brides.
