Esther Before Artaxerxes

The scene comes from the Book of Esther. Esther, the Jewish queen of a Persian king, has come before his throne unsummoned to plead for her people, and at that court approaching uninvited could cost a life unless the king raised his golden sceptre in welcome. Lucas van Leyden staged that tense instant inside a crowded Renaissance hall, guards and courtiers packed around the kneeling queen and the seated king. He cut it into a copper plate in 1518, when he was barely 24. An engraving was made to be printed and repeated, and in these years such sheets were among the first pictures that could really travel, passed from town to town across Europe while a painting stayed on one wall. Impressions struck from this plate survive in print rooms around the world, each one carrying the same lines he engraved in the Dutch town of Leiden.