Three Scenes from the Story of Esther

This long, low panel was never meant to hang on a wall. It decorated the front of a cassone, one of the big carved chests a Florentine bride brought to her new home, usually made in pairs and painted with instructive stories. The subject is the biblical Esther, the Jewish queen who talked a Persian king out of a plan to slaughter her people, and you can read several moments of the tale strung left to right across the wood. It came out of Botticelli's workshop around 1470, and scholars still divide the hands, giving the central group largely to Botticelli and much of the rest to the young Filippino Lippi, then his pupil. Painted furniture like this is where many Florentine painters first learned to tell a story in pictures.