New York, Wildenstein, Italian Paintings, January - February 1947, no. 10, illustrated. New York, Wildenstein, The Painter as Historian, 1963, no. 9. New York, The Jewish Museum, The Hebrew Bible in Art, 1963, no. 109.
Literature
C. Burrows, in New York Herald Tribune, 19 January 1947. E. A. Jewell, in New York Times, 19 January 1947. E. Genauer, in New York Herald Tribune, 18 November 1962 (repr.).
Provenance
Chaliapine Collection. Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 19 April 1967, lot 92 (£22,000 to Patch). Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 26 June 1970, lot 98. with Artemis Fine Arts, New York, by 1977.
Notes
THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR
'And Esther spake yet again before the king, and fell down at his feet, and besought him with tears to put away the mischief of Haman the Agagite, and his device that he had devised against the Jews. Then the king held out the golden sceptre toward Esther. So Esther arose, and stood before the king.' (Esther 8: 3-4).
Elegant, precious, and embellished with intricate gilt details, the present tondo illustrates the scene from the Old Testament in which Queen Esther confronts her husband, King Ahasuerus, who had been induced by his advisor Haman to sign an edict mandating the death of all Jews. Esther, herself a Jew, fasted and prayed for three days before appearing before her husband to beg a pardon for her people - even though she herself risked death by demanding an audience with the king. Sellaio illustrates the pivotal moment in the exchange between Esther and Ahasuerus, when the king leans forward from his throne to hear his wife's plea. At the left of the composition, Ahasuerus is seated on a throne beneath a damask canopy embroidered in gold, surrounded by Haman and his other counselors. Esther kneels before him supported by one of her attendants, with a second maiden behind her carrying her train. The opulent throne room is situated within an elaborate colonnade decorated with gilt reliefs, through which can be seen an extensive mountainous landscape with a river and a Gothic town in the background.
Jacopo del Sellaio, whose surname means '[son] of the saddlemaker', was born circa 1441 and had joined the Compagnia di San Luca in his native Florence by the age of 19. Records from 1473 show him sharing a studio with another Florentine painter, Filippo di Giuliano, and Sellaio's earliest known commission - two panels depicting an Angel Annunciate and Virgin Annunciate for Santa Lucia dei Magnoli - can be dated to 10 December 1477. The linearity and delicacy of the figures and the light pastel palette betray Sellaio's indebtedness to Botticelli, who is described by Vasari as having apprenticed in Fra Filippo Lippi's workshop alongside Sellaio (Vasari, ed. 1550, I, p. 401). Until recently, a majority of paintings produced in Fra Filippo's workshop were given to Botticelli and his followers, yet we now know that from the late 1470s until his death, Sellaio was one of the most productive Florentine painters of his generation. He maintained a professional workshop in Florence with Filippo di Giuliano, who outlived Sellaio and was responsible for completing a number of works after his death. The presence of other hands would also help to explain certain inconsistencies in style and quality within Sellaio's oeuvre.
Despite occasional variations in quality among Sellaio's paintings, the present tondo shares all the characteristics of Sellaio's best works. Dr. Everett Fahy suggests that is it probably not part of a cycle or series, though it is 'obviously related in style and subject to the Esther cassone panels in the Budapest Museum (2537), the Louvre (RF 1274) and the Uffizi (491-3)'. Of these panels, it most closely corresponds to another representation of the same subject, Esther before Ahasuerus (Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), which features a remarkably similar depiction of King Ahasuerus and an Esther who kneels before him in a comparably submissive pose. Behind Esther, her ladies-in-waiting are dressed in fluttering draperies that recall Botticelli's diaphanous gowns. Meanwhile, the extensive and detailed mountainous landscape in the present tondo resembles that of Sellaio's Adoration of the Magi (Brooks Museum, Memphis) which likewise depicts an elaborate rocky setting viewed through a decorative gilt colonnade.
We can also compare Sellaio's tondo to the work of his contemporary, Filippino Lippi, whose paintings come closest to Sellaio's. Look, for instance, at Filippino's Madonna and Child with Angels (Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg). Its similarly small scale suggests that it was intended as a domestic devotional work, and Filippino's style in this instance comes remarkably close to Sellaio's. This is particularly evident in the composition itself, which features two angels holding up the Virgin's train as she bows to the Christ Child; these resemble the two handmaidens holding Esther's train in Sellaio's tondo, down to the tilt of their heads and the implied verbal exchange. Stylistically, both artists make use of clear red, orange-gold, and teal hues and highlight the delicate figures with thin gold lines and decorative gilt details. Finally, both paintings situate their protagonists against a background featuring a tiny Gothic city on the horizon. Filippino's painting is dated to circa 1480, and it would seem reasonable to suggest a similar date for Sellaio's tondo.
The tondo format enjoyed a significant period of popularity in Florence, as well as in other Tuscan cities and regions with a Florentine connection, including Siena and Umbria. Early proponents of the genre, which derived from Christian symbolism and the notion of a circle as a window into heaven, included Fra Filippo Lippi and Domenico Veneziano. The earliest known painting composed in this format is Domenico's Adoration of the Magi of c. 1440 (Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). The reason for its rise appears related to changes in contemporary Florentine society: as quattrocento patrician women spent increasingly less time outside the palazzi, it became ever more necessary to create artwork tailored to the domestic sphere, and more specifically, to create art that conveyed messages of domestic virtue. After reaching a zenith of popularity during the years circa 1480-1515, the tondo began to fall out of use as the Baroque period ushered in a new geometry and the circular shape was replaced by the more mannerist oval. Tondi were generally relatively small in scale like the present work, which measures only 57.2 cm. in diameter, and the format was nearly always used for conventional Madonna and Child compositions intended for private devotion; indeed Sellaio himself reserved the tondo for Madonnas on all other known occasions. Sellaio's singular appropriation of the format for his Esther before Ahasuerus is, therefore, exceptional - yet it remains consistent with the function of the domestic tondo, just as it was an appropriate subject for the decoration of the cassoni (storage chests) found in many Florentine households. The Esther narrative illustrates the story of a pious and virtuous wife, obedient to her husband yet obedient to her God above all others. Together with Judith and a selection of Roman literary heroines such as Virginia and Lucretia, Esther was praised as an example of civic and domestic virtue: with a woman's chastity or fidelity considered fundamental to the stability and order of society, it comes as no wonder that the boundaries between the two spheres were frequently blurred. The Esther narrative would, therefore, have made an admirable model for any young patrician bride.
