Three panels adorning a Wedding Cassone

Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi, known as Lo Scheggia and as Masaccio's younger brother, was the most prolific producer of cassone panels in mid-fifteenth century Florence. Wedding chest panels required historical or mythological narratives appropriate to the marriage occasion — tournaments, classical tales, processions — and Lo Scheggia was the specialist who could deliver these at scale, with lively figures and convincing architecture, without the theological depth demanded by altarpieces. His three-panel cassone structure narrating a wedding-related story is characteristic of the format he mastered over decades of Florentine workshop production.

Lo Scheggia's cassone panels are identifiable by their low, frieze-like spatial organisation with figures moving laterally across a shallow foreground space. His tempera technique is confident and rapid — the faces are type-cast rather than individually characterised — with the heraldic side panels treated more flatly than the narrative centre.