The Banquet of Ahasuerus

Around 1490 this was not a picture meant for a wall. It was part of the painted furniture of a Florentine bridal chamber, a long panel set into a chest or the wainscoting made for a wealthy family's newlyweds. The subject was chosen to instruct the bride. It comes from the Book of Esther, the young Jewish woman who became queen to the Persian king Ahasuerus and used her position to save her people. Here the story opens with the king's own banquet in the palace gardens, a pergola heavy with grapes, the tents of his army commanders hung with rich curtains, headdresses and gold invented to suggest a faraway East. Jacopo del Sellaio ran a workshop that specialised in exactly this kind of marriage furniture. The cycle was later broken up, and its companion panels are now in the Louvre and in Budapest.