This lavishly decorated two-volume Bible comprises over six hundred richly illuminated sheets and is rightly considered the most precious book of the Italian Renaissance. Today in Modena, it was created between 1455 and 1461 for Borso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, by a team of artists led by Taddeo Crivelli and Franco dei Russi.

Placed in the lower register of folio 110r, in the second volume of the Bible, this illumination signals the opening page of the First Book of Maccabees and is an almost literal depiction of an event recorded in verses 5–6 of chapter 1: Alexander the Great summoning the Diadochi, his generals and successors, to his deathbed and dividing his empire among them. The last deed performed by the Macedonian conqueror in his short life is highlighted here on account of the fateful consequences it had. It resulted in the creation of the Seleucid Empire and eventually led to the dominion of Antiochus IV Epiphanes over Judaea. And from that ensued the events that are recounted in the First and Second Book of Maccabees: Antiochus’s persecution of the Jews and the Maccabean Revolt that followed it.

Although the accompanying text states that the Diadochi were the same age as Alexander (‘[they] had been brought up with him from youth’; 1 Maccabees 1:6), they are depicted here as young courtiers, while Alexander is portrayed as an aged, white-bearded king. This iconography is openly in contrast with the fact that Alexander died very young, but is well attested in the fifteenth century, when Alexander tended to assume the physical attributes of wisdom, most notably a beard.

In addition, his appearance in the Borso Bible may reflect the description of him as a sickly, weak man that is given in 1 Maccabees 5: having conquered and subdued most of the known world, Alexander ‘fell sick and perceived that he was dying’.