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This extraordinary casket, made in pastiglia (a white lead paste) on a gilded wooden body, belongs to a group of objects produced in Venice or Ferrara in the first third of the 16th century. Although it bears the mark of the passage of time, the casket we are presenting is in a generally good state of preservation. It is decorated with biblical, mythological and Roman themes that are typical of the productions of the Workshop of the Moral and Love Themes.
- The Pastiglia caskets, a mysterious production of the Italian Renaissance
Although well represented in many public collections around the world
[1], the
pastiglia caskets had not been the subject of a dedicated publication until the research presented by Mr. Patrick de Winter in 1984
[2] , which we have used for our description.
All these caskets have a different decoration based upon small elements molded in white pastiglia, in imitation of ivory or gypsum. Generally rectangular, they are always topped by a hinged lid that closes with a small latch. Many stand on four feet decorated with acanthus leaf motifs, like the one which we are presenting.
The ornamentation of these boxes invariably draws on four repertoires: Roman history, mythology, the Old or, more rarely, the New Testament, mixed with some purely ornamental motifs inspired by antiquity. Patrick de Winter counted 115 examples (half of which attributed to the Workshop of the Moral and Love Themes), so we can imagine that fewer than 200 remain.
The first question coming to one’s mind is what these boxes were used for. They were likely not used to store jewelry (for which there were small metal safes, of which many specimens remain). Of great decorative interest, these boxes were used to store trinkets (such as seals or wax sticks). Some were embellished with courtly motifs and may have been used as engagement gifts. Traces of gold dust on the inside of the one which we are presenting suggest that it was indeed used for this purpose, as gold dust was used in the Renaissance both for book illumination and as a beauty elixir. These boxes are part of the growing Renaissance taste for collecting small objects - medals, statuettes, hard stone objects - inspired by Antiquity.
The exterior decoration of these boxes is characteristic. It is made up of elements in pastiglia, a paste composed of 87% lead white to which sulfate and an egg-based binder are added. This paste was then poured into metal molds to produce small decorative elements, which were then used to compose different scenes, by being glued (with rabbit-skin glue) to the outer faces of the boxes, which had previously been gilded and incised. Careful examination of the different scenes reveals the same decorative elements and the same characters reappearing from one scene to the next on different boxes from the same workshop.
While most of the museums in which they are preserved indicate a Ferrarese provenance, Patrick de Winter rather thought that the workshops that produced these endearing testimonies to a flowering of the decorative arts in the early 16th century were in Venice.
2. Description of the historiated decorations
The scenes depicted on these caskets illustrate the Italian Renaissance taste for histories presenting an ideal of exemplarity and moral sense. The front of our box depicts the Triumph of David, an Old Testament scene often used in the Renaissance alongside ancient figures as an example of courage.
This scene seems to have been depicted quite rarely, as Patrick de Winter mentions only one other box from the same workshop on which it appears. This casket belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and has the same size as the one we are proposing. It also features a lid with the same decoration as the one on our box.
On our casket, to the left of David's Triumph scene, we find a very intriguing intriguing characters which is typical of the Workshop of the Moral and Love Themes’ productions. Nicknamed "the good-natured lancer" by Patrick de Winter, this man is dressed in the fashion of his time. He appears frequently in many other compositions, as for example on the right of the frieze of dancers on a casket preserved at the MET in New York (Inv 17.190.589).
The two lids of our casket and of the V&A one we mentioned earlier are identical. A first frieze decorated with four heads at the corners surrounds a second frieze of laurels in relief. In the middle, two bearded man's face surrounded by foliage surmounted by two harpies frame a fretel decorated at its foot with a twelve-petal daisy motif.
The scene on the left-hand side of our box is more difficult to interpret, but could represent Pompey's death: forced to take refuge in Egypt after his defeat at the battle of Pharsalus, Pompey is assassinated there on the orders of the young Ptolemy XIII Philaptor, before being beheaded. His head (shown in the top left-hand corner of our box) would be offered a few days later to Caesar, upon his landing in Alexandria.
The interpretation of the scene on the back of the casket is also uncertain. It could be
The Clemency of Scipio the African or
Brutus haranguing his Troops[3]. While Brutus is depicted on the side of a casket also preserved at the V&A Museum (Inv. W.48-1911) using the same mold as the figure below our canopy (but without a canopy), the same canopy is found in a scene representing
The Clemency of Scipio the African depicted on a casket preserved at the Kunstgewerbe in Berlin (Inv. 75.690).
The story of Scipio goes as follows: after the capture of Cartagena, Roman soldiers present their general with a young girl of exceptional beauty whom they have just captured. She had been promised to Allutius, and the girl's father presents himself to Scipio with a ransom to free his daughter. Scipio ordered that she be returned to him and that the ransom be used as the girl's dowry. The young girl does not appear on our box (unlike the scene depicted on the Berlin box), but the figure to the right of the baldachin could well be her father, if we accept the use of heroic nudity for the representation of Scipio...
The last scene has no equivalent in the other caskets we have examined. The two boats surmounted by a mermaid (depicted as a half-woman, half-bird creature) evoke a scene from the Odyssey: Ulysses and the Mermaids.
After being warned by Circe, Ulysses had wax poured into his sailors' ears so they couldn't hear the sirens while he was tied to the ship's mast. His sailors received the order to tighten the ties if he requested to untie them. In this way, Ulysses was able to listen to the sirens’ song without rushing towards them, and to overcome the temptation.
In these early years of the 16th century, these boats inevitably evoke the caravels used by Christopher Columbus on his first expedition to the Caribbean (from which he returned in March 1493). This panel could therefore be a subtle allusion to the event that was to dramatically change the world history!
3. Provenance
One of the most illustrious collections of the Renaissance was that of Isabella d'Este (1474 - 1539), wife of Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua. In her famous "grotto" inside her palace in Mantua, she kept many objects demonstrating her "insatiable taste for objects of antiquity", including caskets like the one presented here.
A tempting hypothesis (even if there is no evidence to support it) could explain the discovery of this casket in a mansion in the Nivernais region: it could have come from the famous Gonzague collection and been brought to Nevers by Louis de Gonzague (1539 - 1595), Isabelle's grandson who married Henriette de Clèves, the Duchess of Nevers, in 1565.
Main bibliographical references :
Patrick M. de Winter - A little known Creation of Renaissance decorative Arts: the whitlead Pastiglia Box published in Saggi e Memorie di Storia dell' Arte - Leo S. Olschki Editore - Firenze 1984
Pastiglia Boxes hidden treasures of the Italian Renaissance catalog of the exhibition at the Lowe Art Museum, Miami, 2002
[1] Numerous museums preserve similar boxes, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London - UK (14 examples), the Musée de la Renaissance in Ecouen - France (8 examples), the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore - USA (7 examples), the Kunstgewerbe Museum in Berlin - Germany (6 examples), the Museo di Palazzo Davanzati and the Museo Stibbert in Florence - Italy (5 examples each), the Castello Sforzesco in Milan - Italy (5 examples).
[2] Patrick M. de Winter - A little known Creation of Renaissance decorative Arts: the whitlead Pastiglia Box published in Saggi e Memorie di Storia dell' Arte - Leo S. Olschki Editore - Firenze 1984
[3] Before taking his own life, Brutus is said to have made a famous speech on the meaning of his life to his soldiers. Cf Plutarch Life of Brutus LX 52
