Les Noces de Pélée et Thétis

This panel was the front of a marriage chest, part of the furniture that went with a Florentine bride's dowry towards the end of the 15th century, and its companion in the Louvre shows the procession of the sea nymph Thetis. The feast painted here is the wedding of Thetis to the mortal Peleus, and anyone who owned such a chest knew what happened at it. The goddess of discord, left off the guest list, rolled a golden apple among the guests marked for the fairest, and the quarrel that followed ended in the Trojan War. Bartolomeo di Giovanni turned out this kind of narrative panel steadily, working as a helper in Domenico Ghirlandaio's Florentine workshop. In 1490 the Dominican friar Savonarola began preaching at San Marco in Florence, and seven years later his followers were burning painted chests of exactly this sort in the Piazza della Signoria.