A spalliera (Plural: spalliere) is a decorated backboard mounted on a wall, often behind a

cassone A cassone (plural ''cassoni'') or marriage chest is a rich and showy Italian type of chest, which may be inlaid or carved, prepared with gesso ground then painted and gilded. ''Pastiglia'' was decoration in low relief carved or moulded in ges ...

(a wooden chest used for storage), or as a headboard to a bed. It is usually made out of wood and embellished with decorative aspects such as intricate

carving Carving is the act of using tools to shape something from a material by scraping away portions of that material. The technique can be applied to any material that is solid enough to hold a form even when pieces have been removed from it, and ...

or painting, and is gilded as well. They were common in Renaissance

Tuscany it, Toscano (man) it, Toscana (woman) , population_note = , population_blank1_title = , population_blank1 = , demographics_type1 = Citizenship , demographics1_footnotes = , demographics1_title1 = Italian , demogra ...

. No examples of Florentine sets of ''spalliere'' with inset paintings have survived intact. At the most expensive level, all four walls of a room seem to have had panels fitted, which were richly decorated with carved wood,

marquetry Marquetry (also spelled as marqueterie; from the French ''marqueter'', to variegate) is the art and craft of applying pieces of veneer to a structure to form decorative patterns, designs or pictures. The technique may be applied to case fur ...

, and sometimes paintings inset into the wood. These paintings were usually much wider than tall, like the painted panels on '' cassoni''. They seem often to have been made to celebrate a wedding, and fitted to the marital bedroom, though other important rooms also had them.Lightbown, Ronald, ''Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work'', p. 114, 1989, Thames and Hudson

Sandro Botticelli Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi ( – May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli (, ), was an Italian Renaissance painting, Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th cent ...

and

Piero di Cosimo Piero di Cosimo (2 January 1462 – 12 April 1522), also known as Piero di Lorenzo, was an Italian painter of the Renaissance. He is most famous for the mythological and allegorical subjects he painted in the late Quattrocento; he is said to ...

are two of the better known painters who produced many paintings whose wide format suggests that this was their original function; they have now been given conventional picture frames.

References

{{Reflist
The National Gallery - SpallieraItalian Renaissance Resources
Furniture Renaissance paintings