Esther before Ahasuerus

In the Book of Esther, a Jewish queen risks her life by approaching the Persian king Ahasuerus uninvited, kneeling before him to beg mercy for her people. Medieval readers saw in that kneeling figure a forerunner of the Virgin Mary, interceding with Christ on behalf of the living, and that is why Esther appears on a Basel altarpiece painted around 1435. Witz gives the scene almost no setting, a shallow room, a gold ground, the king enthroned and the queen bowed low before him, both wrapped in the heavy brocades he loved to paint. The panel is not large, under a metre on each side, yet the two figures fill it like carved stone. Everything turns on the king's answer, the golden sceptre held out toward her in a sign that she may live.