The Adventures of Ulysses

Apollonio di Giovanni, the most celebrated painter of wedding chests in fifteenth-century Florence, carried the revival of antiquity into the domestic world of the trousseau. This long cassone front condenses the wanderings of Homer’s hero into a continuous narrative frieze, the episodes of the Odyssey strung between painted seacoasts and fantastical walled towns in the late 1430s and early 1440s, when the Latin and Tuscan romances were retelling his story in the language of merchants and magistrates. In the workshop he shared with Marco del Buono, chests of leading families were made to measure, and this panel survives as one of the most complete of the classicizing cycle by which ancient epic entered the Renaissance city’s most private rooms. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.