Engaged cassetta frame on a polyptych panel

Niccolò di Buonaccorso, a refined Sienese painter active in the second half of the fourteenth century, created this engaged cassetta frame for a polyptych panel around 1380. In Gothic Italy, the frame was not merely a surround but an integral part of the altarpiece, designed and often painted by the same artist who executed the panels within. Now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this frame preserves the inseparable relationship between painting and its architectural setting that was fundamental to Gothic artistic practice.

This cassetta-profile frame is carved in wood with gilded and painted decoration, featuring the molding profiles and ornamental vocabulary characteristic of Sienese Trecento frame-making. The gilded surfaces with tooled and punched patterns demonstrate the same techniques applied to the gold grounds of the paintings they enclosed.