The Book of Judith is in the Apocrypha, which is a collection of writings coeval to the Bible that were not accepted as canonical by the Roman Catholic church until 1566. Protestants reject the Apocrypha as non-canonical. Judith, whose name simply means “Jewess” in Hebrew, was a virtuous widow, reknowned for her beauty and piety, who saved her people from the Assyrian army led by the general Holofernes.
When Holofernes had laid seige to the town of Bethulia, the Jews were faced with starvation, and they despaired, and talked of surrender. Judith spoke out and rebuked them, and said that she herself would deliver the city from Holofernes. She used her wiles to have Holofernes invite her to his tent to spend the night, and she proceeded to charm him and ply him with wine so that he became careless and drunken. And after he’d fallen asleep, she drew Holofernes’ own sword and cut off his head.
With her virtue still intact, she escaped the Assyrian camp with the head of Holofernes, and when the Jews displayed it on a pike, the Assyrians withdrew. Judith then retreated to her house and lived chastely for the rest of her life.
Judith is a common figure in European art from 1400 to 1700, and there are many famous paintings depicting her. Giorgione shows her with a sword and her foot upon his head. Cranach shows her very elegantly dressed, with a feathered hat, with Holofernes’ head on a charger. Botticelli shows her escape, with the head carried by a maidservant, and the horrific discovery of the decapitated general. |
Michelangelo painted an image in the corner of the Sistine Chapel ceiling of Judith covering the head with a cloth as Holofernes sprawls on his bed. Caravaggio’s version, which is the template for this Judith, is remarkable because it shows a combination of resolve and disgust washing over Judith’s face as she separates the head of Holofernes (bearing Caravaggio’s own features) from his body. Some of the most famous depictions of Judith were painted by Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the very few female artists to attain the rank of old master. She was the daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, a reknowned painter, and was taught to be an artist from the earliest age. At the age of 17, her father asked one his apprentices, a painter named Agostino Tassi, to teach her about pictorial perspective. Agostino raped Artemisia. He further abused her by promising marriage, even though he was already married, and Artemisia continued seeing him, believing that he would marry her.
Orazio discovered the truth and brought charges against Tassi and another apprentice who had tried to rape Artemisia, Cosimo Quorli. The case went to trial. After Artemisia was tortured with instruments that damaged her hands, and examined intimately by doctors to ascertain her prior virginity, Tassi was finally convicted, but he spent only 8 months in jail, and was pardoned. A month after the trial ended, Artemisia hastily married another of her father’s apprentices, but her reputation was damaged, and the scandal of the rape trial followed her throughout her career.
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Artemisia made the most of the obvious subtext of Judith iconography, the revenge of the weaker woman upon man the tyrant. Many scholars see that the depiction of decapitation itself is a metaphor for castration. It’s impossible to ignore the outright fury of Artemisia’s Judith paintings. Of her 34 surviving works, overwhelmingly depicting heroic or iconic female subjects, she painted Judith five times, and in each one included elements of her own likeness as Judith. One of these, Judith Slaying Holofernes in the Uffizi, shows a particularly gruesome scene, with Judith sawing away at the conscious Holofernes neck, as she grasps his hair and holds her body as far away as she can, to avoid the spurts of blood.
Centuries later, in 1901, the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt painted a version of Judith that contains undercurrents of the unease some men at the time felt at the growing power and sexual independance of women. Possibly too Klimt alluded to the virulent anti-Semitism of Austrian politics, as Judith, the Jewess triumphantly carries Holofernes’ head.
In my version of Judith, her body is made from various scenes from the Book of Judith, and also includes numerous images of powerful women through the ages. Holofernes’ body is made from images of tyrants. Judith represents the power that even the weakest people reserve to right wrongs. |
