by Madison Clyburn

COURTLY FIGURES AND ANIMALS ENTWINE AROUND BLOOMING SCROLLS that border a central festive multi-sensory scene, the Fountain of Life—a fitting subject to commemorate a celebratory occasion such as a marriage (Fig. 1). A fierce hunt occurs in the background: a lively tantara sounds from the trumpeters, who signal the archers ready to strike at pairs of entangled animals. Satin, silk, fur, and skin mingle in the foreground as musicians play harmonious melodies that weave between dancing lovers who flank a fountain frothing with rose water. The soft, sweet, refreshing scent that perfumes this imaginary event reaches beyond the artistic plane into reality. Traces of perfume manifest in objects for perfuming or to be perfumed, like this cassone or storage chest in the Montreal Museum of Fine Art’s collection, which unknown artisans constructed and delicately carved, punched, and engraved in flat relief in fifteenth-century northern Italy.
The scented aspects alluded to in the engraved celebration on the MMFA cassone extend to the chest itself, presumed to be made of cedar. Though not all species of cedar smell, many contain fragrant oils that conjure dewy woods, spicy citrus, and thickly sweet vanilla resin. The chest’s punched background leaves negative spaces for tinted and, possibly, scented paste to be added, which would only enhance the wood’s naturally aromatic properties. Pastiglia (pasta di muschio or musk paste) is a relief technique that uses ground white lead mixed with perfume extracted from the musk deer or civet cat set in a metal mould and then affixed with rabbit-skin glue to a gesso-prepared cassone.(1) Pastiglia was a popular way to decorate caskets and cassoni in northern Italy during the renaissance.
The MMFA cassone, now bereft of any traces of perfume, encourages us to activate our senses by imaginatively unpacking this empty chest and the scented personal and home goods it once stored. In doing so, the perfumes that once saturated the cassone, the house it resided in, and the bodies that used the items stored inside play a vital role in teaching us about historical everyday olfactory practices. But first, why was perfume so important in early modern Italy?

Perfume’s Therapeutic Power
In the early modern period, people in Italy spent much time thinking about air, perfume, and its power to affect good health. Italian perfume practices drew heavily on classical Greco-Roman medicine and philosophy. People sniffed, wore, ate, and drank perfumed pomanders, beads, lozenges, and waters to restore or maintain bodily equilibrium according to Humourism, a classical medical theory used to determine a person’s physical and mental health based on the balance of four bodily fluids. The philosopher and priest Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) writes in his De vita libri tres (Three Books on Life, 1489) that odours influence air’s positive and harmful effects, especially if they burn with the sun's strength.(2) Others, like the Italian mythographer and diplomat Vincenzo Cartari (1531-69), inspired by ancient Greek thinkers, claim that Aesculapius, the ancient Greco-Roman god of medicine, was made of air purged by the sun's heat to offer health to mortals.(3) An unknown artist’s painting of Aesculapius seated by a brazier (a portable heater or perfume burner) and an aloe plant convey nature’s medicinal products (Fig. 2). The puffs of perfumed smoke rising from the brazier allude to Aesculapius’ healing powers and the power of fragrant air over the body. The medical theory ascribed specific pairs of humoural qualities (e.g., hot, cold, wet, dry) to every perfume, which could, accordingly, complement or thwart one’s natural humoral disposition. When scent and air interacted with a body, and by extension, a home or a cassone, it was believed to affect a person’s wellbeing for better or worse.
The Cassone: Functional and Symbolic
A cassone is a large rectangular storage chest popular in Italy between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Linen or wool lined the interior according to the owners’ budget to preserve the valuable items inside.(4) Though cassoni came in varying sizes, nearly all were multifunctional: Shorter chests doubled as benches and opened hinge lids provided an additional tabletop.
A cassone could range from expensive and ornately decorated to a plainer, more economical option. The Italian artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) reports citizens owned sarcophagus-shaped cassoni with custom decoration such as illustrations of Ovidian fables, jousts, the chase, or love tales. The inside of the lid often included more private imagery seen by only the owner or a few household staff. A middle- or upper-class family likely owned the MMFA cassone, since its simple construction preserves a detailed and elegantly carved front panel that once radiated enticing therapeutic perfumes.

A cassone for an impending marriage is sometimes called a betrothal chest (forzieri da sposa). These celebratory chests, on view in Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) (Fig. 3), symbolize love, fidelity, and familial unity. A nude woman holding a bouquet of sweet roses reclines on sumptuous stacked red mattresses and softly crumpled perfumed sheets; a dog, symbolizing fidelity in marriage, sleeps soundly at her feet. The sun sets as two attendants open one of the cassoni in the background: One woman kneels and riffles through a chest, looking for something particular—possibly an undershirt or box of jewels—while the other, with a gown draped over her shoulder, holds the heavy lid open.
Cassoni like those in this scene had a role in early modern Italian marriage rituals. Betrothal chests were often made in sets of two to bring a bride’s dowry goods from her father’s home to her new husband’s home. A bride might also carry her trousseau—items belonging to her instead of the dowry given to her husband—inside her cassoni. These items often consisted of household linens, cutlery and dishes, fabric for making clothes, medicines, swaddling bands for the children hopefully soon-to-come and personal items like caps, handkerchiefs, stockings, socks, gloves, underwear, menstrual products, hair ribbons, jewellery, spinning and embroidery tools, small devotional books, and, of course, perfumes to scent everything inside.
Unpacking a Cassone: Perfumed Home Goods
A cassone was not exclusively commissioned for a woman’s marriage. Before the standing wardrobe entered Italian homes, many people lined their walls with cassoni to keep their homes tidy and their belongings clean. One such person was Julia Lombardo (d. 1542), who stowed many perfumed objects in various chests. Since the MMFA cassone has long been empty, Lombardo’s postmortem inventory offers an illustrative case study of what one might find and smell in a typical cassone in early modern Italy.
Julia Leoncini, known as Julia Lombardo, was one of two children from the Lombard drapier Zuanne Leoncini and Nonciada Rota. Julia was a courtesan in Venice who supported herself and her dependent sister Angelica, who was Julia’s sole heir. Two inventories made after Angelica’s death in 1569 detail some of the effects she inherited and maintained from Julia’s apartment in Venice and her country home in nearby Brenta. These lists offer a glimpse of the comfortable lifestyle Julia’s income enabled her to acquire for herself and her sister.

The inventories indicate the range of scented goods some women in early modern Italy stored in their cassoni. Organized room by room, the inventory from Julia’s home in Venice, Casa Lombardo, describes the interior of a moderately wealthy Venetian family. Six matching chests (casse) in the main bedroom contained items evocative of a patrician bride’s lavish trousseau, including two vials of musk stored with Julia’s linen undershirts (camicia) to perfume them.(5) Linen shirts were fashionable during the sixteenth century—the Leoncini sisters together owned sixty-seven! These plain or embroidered garments kept the body and costly outer garments clean by absorbing sweat and dirt (Fig. 4). A camicia masked body odor with floral scents once doused with rose water, jasmine or orange blossom oil.
Sacred and profane aromatic home goods coexisted in various cassoni in Casa Lombardo. Julia or Angelica’s amber or ambergris paternoster beads, found in a walnut chest, emitted a heavenly scent when warmed by touch during prayer.(6) Grains from the two old musk deer bladders or pods stored in a chest nearby may have been used to make scented jewelry, cosmetics, food, or beverages. Musk’s location in the caudal gland near the musk deer’s sex organs led to its association as an aphrodisiac and inclusion in fertility treatments in the early modern period. However, it was also a popular ingredient in other perfume recipes, such as in sachets to scent clothes or incense pastilles to burn in a room.
The Leoncini sisters stored even more perfume supplies in another small chest, including a piece of perfumed wood. This might help preserve the velvet cushion and women’s trousers stored with it against harmful air or hungry insects.(7) A household servant may have removed one of the two good copper perfume vases in the same chest and added fragrant wood before setting it on a table to infuse the linens with a heady combination of resinous aloeswood and pungent musk as the sisters dined.(8) Alternatively, the Leoncini sisters may have used the steel mirror, lead medicine jar, Turkish bowl, and small Damask basin—all stored in the same chest—at their daily toilette to wash their face with scented water and apply fragrant moisturizers and cosmetics with the perfume burners in the back of the room to create a wholesome atmosphere (Fig. 5).

The Leoncini sisters’ postmortem inventories allow us to sort through the various scented home goods common in moderately wealthy women’s households in early modern Italy. All the fragrant items stored in cassoni would have been considered essential to creating a healthy and pleasurable home where Julia could entertain clients or where the Leoncini sisters might read, play music, converse, pray, and sleep comfortably, safe from potentially unpleasant or infectious air wafting through Venice’s streets.
Madison Clyburn is an Art History PhD candidate at McGill University. Her dissertation focuses on perfume and the material culture of women’s wellness in late medieval and early modern Italy.
This article appears in the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of Ornamentum magazine. To purchase the issue or subscribe, head to our store.
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Deborah Krohn, “Casket (Cassetta),” in Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, ed. Andrea Bayer (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008), 109-10.
Ficino, De vita III, 20: 352/3, from Sergius Kodera, Disreputable Bodies: Magic, Medicine and Gender in Renaissance Natural Philosophy (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2010), 169; for a discussion on air, see Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Ch. 3.
Vincenzo Cartari, Immagini degli dei degli antichi (In Padoa: appresso Pietro Paulo Tozzi libraro, [1571] 1608), 76.
Giorgio Vasari, “Dello,” in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Vol. 1, trans. Mrs. Jonathan Foster (London: George Bell & Sons, 1900), 328.
Cathy Santore, “Julia Lombardo, ‘Somtuosa Meretrize’: A Portrait by Property,” Renaissance Quarterly 4, no. 1 (1988): 48.
Santore, “Julia Lombardo”: 72.
Santore, “Julia Lombardo”: 66.
Santore, “Julia Lombardo”: 64, 66.
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