Banished Vashti

This intriguing painting forms one end of a Florentine wedding cassone, a decorated wooden chest that would have contained the dowry of a bride entering marriage in the Renaissance period. These marriages were often arranged around strategic political and financial alliances.

Here, we find Vashti banished from the city, standing outside the imposing, fortress-like city gate of Susa—the setting of the biblical narrative. Filippino Lippi’s painting imagines this scene in his own Italian context: a fortified Renaissance city in the Tuscan landscape. In front of Vashti lies the vast kingdom that reaches ‘from India to Ethiopia’ (Esther 1:1), but here all the cultural exoticism that description in the text might conjure to a Western European imagination is rendered bleak, uninhabited, and inhospitable. This is certainly not a vista anyone wants to find themselves facing alone. This was precisely the didactic message of the painting; indeed, the choice of this story for this wedding chest, often presented as a gift from the parents of those being married, implied that the consequences of the bride’s disobedience to her husband might be similar to those of Vashti: ejection from the home and possibly even the city.

Vashti finds herself, in the shadow of the city walls, alone, ostracized, and vulnerable stepping out onto a threshold: a little moat bridge. She is stretching out her left arm as she tentatively steps forward into an uncertain future.

Of course, the text does not mention what happens to Vashti after the king deposes her; is she banished from the city or is she relegated to his harem never to be called forth again? This panel, however, leaves the bride in no doubt about Vashti’s fate. Vashti holds the centre of the composition, adorned in luxurious fabrics (textiles would have formed a key part of a dowry).

Paradoxically, there is a sense of metamorphosis about her dignified posture and gesture, her stepping forth from this cloak, shedding the role of objectified queen almost like a skin, her green dress suggestive that new life is possible, despite all.

In this lithograph the king, accompanied by his courtiers, towers over Vashti from his throne at the top of a flight of stairs. Vashti, at the lower right, turns away and appears to withdraw into herself.

The biblical text is unclear about the fate of Vashti, and she disappears never to be heard of again. Here, at the foot of the stairs, she looks as though she has been banished to a dark, stony dungeon.

A strong diagonal divides the composition from the lower left to the upper right, separating Vashti from the king and his council. Could it represent collapsing columns in the palace, as Vashti’s ‘disobedience’ is presented not merely as a personal affront to Ahasuerus, but as threatening the stability of his vast kingdom? In this tale, political power and sexual relations are closely interwoven.

Strong emotion is often evoked through colour in Marc Chagall’s work. Vashti, perhaps pensive in expression, adopts a pose that is frequently to be seen in Chagall’s depiction of the prophets—for example the lithographs, Pleurs de Jérémie (1956), David et Bethsabée (1956), Le prophète et l’ange (1979). Her body curves inwards on itself as she contemplates her situation.

Unlike the king, Vashti is not accompanied by an entourage of supporters; she is alone and must rely on her own resources to face the consequences of her decision. She draws her arms around her protectively, crossing them asymmetrically over her body to cover herself, adopting the classical ‘Venus Pudica’ pose (as seen in Masaccio’s c.1425 fresco of Eve leaving the Garden of Eden in shame). Vashti retreats from the glare of the men, and yet she seems unable to escape their gaze altogether. Their eyes, like the viewer’s, follow her—they are evoked in the pattern on her dress.

Ahasuerus is aflame with rage, a burning tower in the inky-blue darkness, his elaborate and highly decorated red gown a reflection of both his heightened emotional state and his regal status.

As his drunkenness turns to outrage, the text describes the king turning to his sages who knew the laws. Here, these figures, diminutive beside their megalomaniac king, reflect his rage in their flushed faces as they look down on Vashti with contempt.

The opening chapters of Esther describe how—after months of lavish drinking banquets—the king sent his eunuchs to fetch his queen, Vashti, that he might display her beauty to the men he had gathered around him. The carnivalesque atmosphere of the book’s opening is captured in this painting by Richard McBee—while the grandeur of the king’s court is also hinted at: white cotton curtains, marble pillars, porphyry, mother-of-pearl, and coloured stones picked up in the pinks and blues of the composition.

This unusual and complex interpretation of the Vashti vignette appears to project the king’s fantasy, for in reality (as the text tells us) Vashti refused to come. A naked Vashti, adorned with little except her tiered crown, a sparkly belt, and possibly a veil, performs a cabaret-style dance, for the implied male gaze of the king and his guests. Her intended objectification as described in the text is here suggested by her representation as an animal with a tail. And she is not just an animal, but a domesticated one—turned into a pet for the king; harnessed, obedient, and performing.

Vashti’s tail, clearly evident in this painting, derives from a collection of rabbinic midrashim that present Vashti in a negative light, implying that she had licentious intent when she organized her own banquet at the other end of the king’s castle. According to an associated tradition, the angel Gabriel came and fixed a tail to her (Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 12b). God intervened in various ways to prevent Vashti from heeding Ahasuerus’s request. Thus God directed matters so that Vashti would be deposed and Esther would reign in her stead.

The intriguing second figure in the painting—a naked female ‘hiding’ in the shadows on the other side of the wall—may be interpreted in more than one way. She might be the real Vashti of the text who refused to come forth and be paraded before the men—rejected, isolated, and cast out; stripped of royal status for her refusal to obey. Or she could be Esther, the young woman who would soon be paraded before the king and win his favour.

References

Berlin, Adele. 2001/5761. Esther, The JPS Bible Commentary (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society)