Game board box. Northern Italy, 15th century

Game board box; Northern Italy, 15th century.
Walnut core and marquetry of bone, boxwood and walnut.
The polychromy is preserved.
It has slight faults.
Measurements: 6.5 x 15.5 x 19.5 cm.
The chest is made from a wooden core, covered on the outside with an ornamental geometric marquetry design. It has a rectangular structure, with a simple rectangular box. It has a lock on the front. The decoration is organised in bands of alternating rhomboid and triangular shapes, the former being made up of small pieces cut out and inlaid in wood in their colour, stained wood and bone, using the technique known as 'alla certosina' marquetry.
The aesthetics of the piece have been conceived in the style of Baldassare degli Embriachi. In French Balthazar Embriachi, born in Florence, was an ivory sculptor belonging to the Florentine school of the Italian Renaissance of the late 14th and early 15th centuries. The family workshop he ran produced an enormous quantity of cult objects (often depicting Christological scenes) and secular objects between 1393 and 1433, in Florence and then in Venice (workshop run by the Florentine sculptor Giovanni di Jacopo) to compete with the French workshops in Paris in the 13th and 14th centuries and to supply the incipient Italian and then European bourgeoisie. For reasons of economy, he often replaced the ivory with bone plaques surrounded by marquetry and fixed on a wooden support. Boxes of this type were most commonly made in the Veneto area during the 15th and 16th centuries and were exported all over Europe, where they were highly appreciated by the aristocratic classes. The type of technique has similarities with other contemporary techniques such as the Catalan 'pinyonet', making it difficult to establish its origin unequivocally. This type of technique has been linked to works originating in the Carthusian Monastery (Certosa) in Pavia, but recent studies point to the Veneto region, a commercial port with important contacts with the East, and in this type of geometric, small, abstract inlay, there is an undeniable Muslim influence.