The outcast

This small panel was never meant to hang on a wall. Around 1480 in Florence it was set into a piece of furniture, a chest or a wainscot, as one scene in a series telling the Old Testament story of Esther. The lone figure weeping on the palace steps, discarded clothes at the foot of the stairs, was long taken for a cast-out woman, which is how it came by the name The Outcast. It is almost certainly Mordecai, Esther's kinsman, mourning outside the king's gate. Scholars still argue over whose hand painted it, Botticelli's own or that of his gifted pupil Filippino Lippi, and the other panels of the Esther story are now scattered across different collections.