Cod. 018

Reproduction of Renaissance Siena frame with black paint on gold. It’s a 16th-century typical Cassetta frame with black squares along the outer edge.

Width cm 11.5

Renaissance Siena Frame

Reproduction of Renaissance Siena frame with painted gilt decorations on black paint. This Siena 16th-century model is available for any particular painting size.

Structural properties

This Renaissance frame is made with ayous and tulipwood combined together. We use ayous for the front side and tulipwood for the backside of the frame. As a result, we obtain the maximum strength with the minimum weight.

You can customize the rabbet width as you prefer. For instance, if you need to cover a bigger part of the painting you can ask to enlarge it. The rabbet depth instead, depends on the thickness of the painting. In most of our models, it is something between 1.5 to 4 cm. Sometimes even deeper due to structural reasons or under request.

Section width cm 11.5
Rabbet cm 1

360° presentation

Click on the video below to see this replica frame with a 360° overview.

Renaissance frame decorations

The process of decoration is entirely made by hand. Any single black square is diligently painted one by one upon a gilded surface giving this Renaissance frame an extraordinary look. The town of Siena, during the 1500s, manifested its art with a particular focus on painted and gilded squares. It is a kind of decoration that one can easily see all over the architecture of the town itself.

Even the corner decorations are very typical of Renaissance art. The logic of their structures is always the same, very few details change from frame to frame. Below we share a video that shows the gilder in action with a very innovative technique to realize the gold corner decorations.

It is a technique that allows prices to remain quite affordable. On the contrary, the use of the original gilding technique would arise the final price quite a lot.

Gold painted decorations for a Renaissance Siena frame

Patina (aging process)

“Patina” is an Italian word that refers to how dark and old look to be the frame. Apart from dark gold, the age of a frame is determined by a few cracks and tiny broken parts all around the sides. For this purpose, our gilder hits its surfaces with some kinds of stones.

Also, the wormholes are simulated as well, and you will be able to notice them by analyzing deeply the pictures above. The presence of wormholes does not indicate activity within or a recent flight of beetles. Remember that they were faked by us to specifically age this Renaissance frame reproduction.

See below a video showing all the steps of the Patina.