Note 10: — NOTES ON EARLY ITALIAN GESSO WORK

Stamped work, again, mentioned by Cennino, is another distinct method in gesso decoration. Of this a very beautiful example is the early fourteenth-century Italian cassone (No. 317—1894). This cassone is decorated with figures of knights and ladies on horseback, in hawking and hunting array, each figure being silhouetted in clear profile in a separate square panel, in white, upon a black or a red ground, alternately. These spaces or panels are divided horizontally by bands of running ornament in relief, and, vertically by bands of thin wrought iron foliated at the edges which form protecting and strengthening bands for the chest. The stamps from which these figures were produced must have been most delicately cut. They are full of fine detail and charming in design. It is not quite clear how they could have been so cleanly stamped upon the ground, unless perhaps, the edges and outlines were carefully gone round and cleared afterwards, or the paste in which they were stamped, perhaps being slow in setting and more or less elastic, might have allowed of their being stamped cleanly out of the material separately and applied to the gesso ground or the chest afterwards.10