“Truly Splendid and Magnificent”: Marriage Feasts in Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Domestic Paintings

Elite marriage celebrations in Tuscany during the fifteenth century consisted of elaborate, public suites of events that included parades, spectacles, jousts, musical interludes, and, above all, sumptuous banquets. As part of the nuptial festivities, wealthy families also commissioned artists to create cassoni wedding chests to transport the bride’s dowry to her new home. These luxurious furnishings often portrayed secular and mythological themes, including images of wedding banquets that paralleled the actual feasts. Not only did these fictive meals reflect late medieval traditions of courtly love, they highlighted how food culture commemorated civic and familial values during the late fifteenth-century. Although descriptions of wedding celebrations survive in diaries, orations, and epistolary sources, images of nuptial feasts and the food they portray have been overlooked by scholars. This paper expands our knowledge of foodways by exploring examples of nuptial furniture depicting imaginative meals. In this consideration, the illustrated meals will be evaluated in the cultural context in which the objects were created, with special attention paid to the foods and dishes depicted. By analyzing a series of nuptial feast scenes on cassoni, this article reconciles the patrons’ desires to project civic virtues with developing trends in food and art in central Italy.