spalliera
Illustration — The Tragedy, Death or Suicide of Lucretia, a painting for a spalliera by Sandro Botticelli A spalliera (Plural: spalliere) is a decorated backboard mounted on a wall, often behind a cassone (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 or painting, and is gilded as well. They were common in Renaissance Tuscany.
Also recorded as spalliere
spalliera
Sandro Botticelli · Public domain
- Field
- painting · furniture
Reference Check
Propose documentary evidence for spalliera. A contribution is never written directly as fact: identity, source, rights and evidence gates still decide.
Sign in to contribute
World of VALÉORINE
Documentary connections
Only confirmed graph relationships appear here. Images are shown only when their identity and reuse rights both pass the documentary gate.
Documentary evidence
Documentary basis
Authority files
wikidata · Q7573007
In this article
Overview
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, 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. Sandro Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo 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.
Spalliera is a painting or furniture.
Text attribution
Licensing
Text attribution
Part of the biographical narrative on this page reuses licensed material. Its origin, revision and licence are recorded here.
The biographical narrative on this page is based on the Wikipedia article Spalliera, revision 1033567113 (EN edition), by its contributors. VALÉORINE has edited that text and built its own documentary record around it. The reused material is available under CC BY-SA 4.0, and this page's reuse of it is offered under the same licence. Everything else on this page — the chronology, the holdings, the evidence, the plates and the connections — is VALÉORINE's own record. Sources and licences.
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Lightbown, Ronald, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work, p. 114, 1989, Thames and Hudson
References
Citations
References
Each reference names the institution holding it, so a reader may go to the document itself.
authority record
General reference
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 16 August 2026.
Elsewhere in Furniture
924 published records in this field, each with its sources named.
- Social SofaTerminology
- sofa bedTerminology
- solar street lightTerminology
- sounding boardTerminology
- spindleTerminology
- spinet deskTerminology
- splatTerminology
- St Andrews SarcophagusTerminology
Best supported in this field
For owners
Own an object connected with spalliera?
A specialist will read what you send and tell you what the house can establish, what it cannot, and whether the object is suited to sale. There is no charge and no obligation. The object stays with you throughout; nothing is shipped to us unless it is arranged in writing beforehand.