Wedding Dance (the Cassone Adimari)

This long panel shows a wedding party in Florence around 1450. Under a striped canopy, couples in clothes sewn with pearls and woven with gold and silver dance the slow Florentine way, linked only by their fingertips, while musicians play close by. The Baptistery rises behind them, and the Loggia del Bigallo closes one end of the scene. Near it, servants carry a basin and a footed dish into a house, probably the bride's gifts arriving at her new husband's home. For a long time the panel was taken for the front of a wedding chest, a cassone, made for an Adimari family marriage in 1420, hence its name. It was in fact the centre of a spalliera, a wooden furnishing hung on the wall, and its style rules out a date before the mid-15th century. The painter, once called the Master of the Cassone Adimari, is now identified as Lo Scheggia, brother of Masaccio and a maker of luxury furniture for wealthy families.