Queen Vashti Leaving the Royal Palace

This panel was never meant to hang on a wall. It was the side of a cassone, a painted chest that a Florentine bride carried into her new household, and it was made in the 1470s in Botticelli's busy workshop, much of the actual painting left to his teenage assistant Filippino Lippi. The subject is a warning wrapped in a wedding gift. Queen Vashti of Persia, having refused her husband's summons, is banished from the palace, one scene in a set that held up her successor Esther as the model of the obedient wife. Look at the city she leaves. It is no ancient Susa but a walled Tuscan town, towers and all, the biblical East rebuilt as the Florence the newlyweds actually knew.