The coat of arms on this cassone can be identified as that of the Vitelli family of Città di Castello impaled with the same family. The upper elements consists of three fleurs-de-lis, above a calf with a palm. The iron hinges seem to be Nineteenth Century replacements. The back left foot has also been replaced.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is publishing Furnishing the Museum: The Italian Furniture in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the first complete catalog of the museum’s collection of Italian furniture. The ambitious effort was compiled by Fausto Calderai, a furniture expert based in Florence, Italy, and Alan Chong, formerly the William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the collection at the Gardner Museum and now director of the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore.

The 340-page hardcover catalog features essays by Calderai and Chong, as well as more than 350 photographs of the collection. The new publication will be available at the museum store when the museum reopens on January 19, following the completion of the new wing by architect Renzo Piano.

The museum’s collection of Italian furniture spans from the Renaissance to the Nineteenth Century and features among its highlights a set of gilded and painted chairs made in the 1770s for the Palazzo Borghese in Rome. The authors explore the chairs’ original context, the lives of their maker and the important connection to the artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

The catalog is published in collaboration with Periscope Press and is made possible by a grant from the Richard C. von Hess Foundation.

For more information, 617-264-6096 or www.isgm.org .