The best-known visual representations of Judith are those of the early mod-ern period, dominated by now legendary conceptions of major figures.24 Among the Italians, the list would not fail to contain Donatello, Mantegna,
Giorgione, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and both Gentileschis, while north of the Alps, we would find Baldung, Cranach, and Rubens, among others.
Innovations abound, instigated by humanism and transformations in polit-ical, social and cultural arenas. Even before the impact of the Reformation 24 These individual works of art and the iconographic history they constitute have generated an immense body of scholarship. Among the more useful over-views, beyond the lists in the standard iconography compilations, are the article by Mira Friedman, “The Metamorphoses of Judith,” Jewish Art, 12–13 (1986–87), pp. 225–47, which includes Jewish material; chapter 5 of Mary Garrard, Artemesia Gentileschi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); and the monograph by Jaynie Anderson, Judith (Paris: Éditions du Regard, 1997). The interdisciplinary study by Stocker, Judith: Sexual Warrior (1998), offers a wide-ranging but uneven treatment of visual and other materials and themes addressed in this section.
brought new energy to the discourse, artists began the energetic investi-gations of Judith’s inherently paradoxical qualities, which account for the sometimes bewildering range of interpretative positions on display. It is well known that by the late fifteenth century, two of the traits with which she defeated Holofernes, her beauty and her deceit, began to assume new carnality and sensuality.
Although the point is not often stressed, the adventurous new trends coexisted with the medieval associations with Mary. The most authorita-tive example of iconographic innovation in the service of Marian tradition is Michelangelo’s pendentive in the Sistine Chapel ceiling (ca. 1509),25 but it is not alone. Wherever typological programs continued to flourish, the holy widow of Bethulia could be found among the Old Testament company, both in major Marian shrines such as Siena Cathedral (mosaic pavement panel, 1470s) and more modest sites like Santa Maria della Pace in Rome (fresco by Peruzzi, 1516). The new points of view about depicting Judith were thus added to the already complex base of earlier Christian thinking.
The mix of continuity and change can also be seen in the treatment by early modern artists of the climactic decapitation of Holofernes and its aftermath. The medieval preference for the scene in the tent prevailed and was given even more prominence, among both Protestants and Catholics, while the potential for psychological resonance was expanded by an ever-enlarging repertory of narrative possibilities, from Donatello on. It was, of course, Caravaggio who famously jolted the convention into terrifying new life by portraying the beheading in progress, with Holofernes awakening from his inebriation into screaming consciousness.
Renaissance and Baroque art also took up a few other episodes, some-times as a sequence of events encompassing the to-and-fro between Bethulia and Holofernes’s camp, and even, occasionally, the banquet in his tent (as part of a multi-scene painting by Cranach, for example) or the final battle (sixteenth-century large-scale woodcuts from Germany).26 The discursive approach lived on most notably in Netherlandish print and tapestry cycles, in the occasional painting series and in printed Bibles and biblical compi-25 The general Marian cast of the typological scheme of the Sistine Ceiling, articulated by Esther Gordon Dotson in 1979 (“An Augustinian Interpretation of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling,” Art Bulletin, 61, pp. 223–56, 405–29), has recent-ly been updated, with the specific role of Judith clarified, by Kim Butler, “The Immaculate Body in the Sistine Ceiling,” Art History, 32:2, April 2009, pp. 250–89.
26 For a full list cf. Adelheid Straten, Das Judith-Thema in Deutschland im 16. Jahr-hundert. Studien zur Ikonographie. Materialien und Beiträge (Munich: Minerva-Fachse-rie Kunst, 1983).
lations, such as the illustrated “Bibles historiques,” as well as in secular interior decorations. An interesting example of the latter, unaccountably ignored in the Judith literature, is the early seventeenth-century painting cycle at the chateau of Ancy-le-Franc in Burgundy, by Nicolas de Hoey.27
Most familiar are the iconic depictions, often devoid of narrative setting, of Judith with the sword and the head of Holofernes. They are found in vir-tually all media, products of every national tradition, not only in painting, sculpture, and prints, but also domestic artifacts, such as needlework, ceram-ics, and other tableware. There are many other manifestations. Their contexts and expressive contents range across categories: sacred and profane, private and public, erotic and patriotic. Judith with her sword naturally figured Justice, but her symbolic applications extended far beyond this one virtue.
One of the paramount contexts for Renaissance iconography, the revival of classical antiquity and the culture of humanism, yielded predictably rich results for Judith, among them the expansion of figural sources and their formal vocabulary. Much still remains to be probed in this domain (for ex-ample, how the costuming of Judith could imbue her with the spirit of an-tiquevirtù). Garbed in clothing and ornaments suffused with references to Athena and the Amazons rather than in the nondescript cloaks of medieval personifications, the Judiths of Italian artists from Donatello to Artemisia Gentileschi are literally enveloped in the authoritative mantle of classical female heroism (cf. Apostolos-Cappadona, Chap. 18). In this way, the taint of sinful seductive purpose in the sumptuous garments she dons for her expedition to Holofernes’s camp, which Jerome characterized in the Vulgate as God’s express wish and which was nervously glossed over by the theo-logical authors, was vitiated. The medieval tradition of pairing Judith con-ceptually with powerful classical women, such as Queen Tomyris, was thus visually updated by early modern artists in both explicit and allusive ways.
Donatello’s bronze group of the late 1450s occupies a precocious posi-tion in the development of related aspects of humanist influence on Judithic iconography. It established precedents for the encompassing of allegori-cal abstraction in psychologiallegori-cally nuanced characterization and with it the 27 Ciletti thanks Christine Rolland for informing her about this and other French Judithic sites and for taking her there. An accessible general introduction to the paintings at Ancy (1596–1611), with illustrations, is Magali Bélime-Droguet, “Nico-las de Hoey. De Fontainebleau à Ancy-le-Franc,” Revue de l’art, 163:1 (2009), pp.
45–54. For the slightly earlier Judith window in the village of Belmesnil in Upper Normandy, see Laurence Riviale, Le vitrail en Normandie entre Renaissance et Réforme (1517–1596) (Corpus Vitrearum, France, Études, VII) (Rennes: Presses Universita-ires de Rennes, 2007), pp. 365–69.
elaboration of the potential for political appropriation. His sculpture has been much studied in both categories, with the civic dimensions generally paramount, thanks to its original ownership by the Medici, upon whose exile it was co-opted by the Florentine Republic in 1495. The modalities of Judith’s republican symbolism were modeled by classical and medi-eval authors who influenced the Tuscan discourse, as well as contempo-rary sermons by Savonarola (cf. Blake McHam, Chap. 17). Central to this topic is Judith’s long history as a justification for tyrannicide, a topic which would soon explode into violent polemics in the wars of religion, especially after high-profile political assassinations in France, beginning in the 1560s and including the regicides of Henri III and IV (1589, 1610) (cf. Cummings, Chap. 12). In each case, the assassin, whether Protestant or Catholic, was hailed by his proponents as a new Judith.
Florentine civic interests can be seen to resonate not only with Judith’s exploits in the Assyrian camp, so graphically explored by Donatello, but also with her redomestication after returning to Bethulia (cf. Crum, Chap.
16). While Judith, together with David, was a potent public figure, the majority of her imagery in Renaissance Florence consisted of sculptures, paintings, and furniture, such as cassoni (marriage chests) made for pri-vate settings (the interiors of patrician palaces). This is a salutary reminder that the mighty deed in the public realm of war which earned Judith the accolade “manly” was also understood as an emphatically temporary in-version of the “natural” social order. Again we meet the practice of (de)em-phasizing segments of Judith’s saga in order to create the desired message or meaning for the intended audience. This adaptability to circumstances and to even conflicting purposes is one ramification of the inherent moral ambivalence of the figure of Judith, who could be and was shaped into whatever persona was required.
The civic ramifications of the domestic exemplarity of the widow of Bethulia lead us to somewhat opposing categories of literary production of the early modern era, and they have ramifications in the visual realm:
comportment literature, the “Querelle des Femmes” and popular enter-tainment. Judith was a “star” in all of them but for different reasons. The patristic tradition of celebrating Judith for her temperance, fasting, pru-dence, prayer, and, above all, chastity continued to be promoted in behav-ior manuals and sermons, especially in the sections addressed to widows.
In this category it was her return to a reclusive life of ascetic piety and her spurning of suitors that were held up for approbation. Judith thus
reinforced gender-based conventions, rooted in the presumed moral defi-ciencies of the female sex in general, to which she offered a corrective. But from at least Christine de Pizan’s “Le Livre de la Cité des Dames” (early fifteenth century), her exemplarity was granted a more active role: she was included among the other women whose heroism and virtue entitled them to enlistment in the arguments against misogynist detractors in the
“Querelle.” Thus from the literary and visual ranks of the “Nine Worthies,”
where she and her old companions Jael and Esther represented Old Testa-ment heroines, she joined the cast of virile “femmes fortes,” whose pop-ularity rose with the ascension of queens to the thrones of England and France in the late sixteenth century.28
At the same time, Judith’s “sisterhood” with biblical figures could be used to vilify her or at least to emphasize her equivocal morality, on grounds that are fundamentally sexual. We see this when she was paired, in literature and the visual arts, with Eve and Delilah. Holofernes thus joined Adam and Samson, male victims of female cunning. He and Judith joined the “couples” that proved how men are deceived and enslaved by women. The development of this trope in German literature can be traced in the ways that erotic metaphorical language was used already in the fif-teenth and sixfif-teenth centuries to include Judith among the cunning women – one result being the emergence in Reformation drama of a new comic side to the story with a lovesick Holofernes and a camp of boisterous merce-naries (cf. Lähnemann, Chap. 13). Interest in Holofernes himself and the vicissitudes of his situation, amorous and otherwise, sometimes gained him the spotlight, as seen in such dramatic works as Giovanfrancesco Al-berti’s Oloferne Tragedia (1594).
It should be noted that neither this introduction nor the papers in this volume engage directly with the application to literary or artistic produc-tion of the Freudian correlaproduc-tion of decapitaproduc-tion to castraproduc-tion, which has dominated much of modern thinking and writing about Judith. The psy-chosexual issues have been thoroughly aired by cultural historians across the humanities’ disciplines, as well as by psychoanalysts themselves.29 28 Cf. Bettina Baumgärtel and Silvia Neysters, Die Galerie der starken Frauen: Die Heldin in der franzoschischen und italienischen Kunst des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich:
Keinkhardt and Biermann, 1995).
29 Among the signposts in this discourse are the articles in American Imago by Graeme Taylor, “Judith and the Infant Hercules,” 41:2 (1984), pp. 101–15, and Lau-rie Schneider, “Donatello and Caravaggio: The Iconography of Decapitation,” 33:1 (1976), pp. 76–91. Cf. also Mary Jacobus, Reading Women (New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 1986) and Richard Spear, “Artemisia Gentileschi, Ten Years of Fact
Freud’s assertion of the sexuality of Judith, apropos of Hebbel’s play (cf.
Mecky Zaragoza, Chap. 25) is well known, as is Sacher-Masoch’s voluptu-ous fantasy of identification with Holofernes and its afterlife in the paint-ings of Klimt and his contemporaries. For the early modern period the kind of psychoanalytic approach that attends to artists’ sexual biographies and their unconscious motivations has indelibly marked the recent literature, especially on Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi.30
Rather than revisit this well-tended path, we wish instead to stress here the opportunity to enlarge the framing of Judith’s cogency offered by less-familiar images, notably those commissioned for Roman Catholic sites (cf.
Ciletti, Chap. 19). Such works testify to the enduring relevance of the patris-tic framework to ecclesiaspatris-tical sponsors of the visual arts to a degree that had not been understood heretofore. Identical Catholic imperatives can be seen in Judith’s treatment in the contemporary theater in Italy, where two of the most cited manifestations are the Jesuit school plays and the court drama of Federico della Valle (ca. 1590s; cf. Marsh, Chap. 21), which was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. One must also note the stained glass win-dows of Northern European churches, such as those of Upper Normandy and the Netherlands, where the polemical context of the wars of religion applied. The consideration of this material is not antithetical to a psycho-logically inflected approach, as it helps us situate the varied concerns of both artists and patrons, offering in the process insights into the fertility of the persistent intersection of textual and visual interpretation.
Of course there is no shortage of eroticism in the Book of Judith. It clearly troubled her patristic fashioners and their successors, for whom her Ecclesia/Mary analogies were vital. From Jerome on, the latent sexuality of the chaste widow who calculatedly enticed and exploited the lust of her adversary was suppressed by the Church and recast into its submerged opposite. But the enduring Christian belief in essential female wantonness, the inheritance of Eve, meant that suspicions about Judith’s sexual morality and Fiction,” The Art Bulletin, 82 (September 2000), pp. 568–79.
30 For both painters, the twin poles of the psychoanalytic axis are the brutality of their treatments of the beheading of Holofernes and the documented episodes of violence in their lives – Caravaggio’s criminal record of assaults and even a killing (1606); Gentileschi’s sexual violation as detailed in trial proceedings (against Ago-stino Tassi, 1612). Accessible sources include the documentary appendices in Cath-erine Puglisi, Caravaggio (London and New York: Phaidon, 2000), Mary Garrard, Ar-temisia Gentileschi (1989) and Orazio and ArAr-temisia Gentileschi, ed. Keith Christiansen and Judith Mann (New York and New Haven, CT: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2001).
could not be obliterated.31 New opportunities for exploring this issue were offered in the visual arts by the humanist-influenced validation of nude representations, which could signal both “manly” heroism and “womanly”
seductiveness, and every intermediate stage in between. Nudity, either par-tial or total, enhanced Judith’s transition from “femme forte” to “femme fatale.” It is in the latter guise that she is best known now, with key testimo-nials provided by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prints and paintings by an international cast of artists, among them Beham, Cranach, Rubens, and Saraceni.
On the opposite side of this coin is one of the more interesting facets of Judith’s reception history, namely that in response to sermons and com-portment treatises fostering her exemplarity, some early modern women actively identified with her. There is a wide range of such indications, especially in Italy and France. One is the rise of historiated portraits and even self-portraits, i.e., likenesses of actual women/artists in the guise of Judith, holding the head of Holofernes;32 literary parallels may be found in such cases as the poetry of Gabrielle de Coignard (cf. Llewellyn, Chap. 11).
Another is the commissioning of literary, musical, and visual representa-tions of Judith by women patrons, particularly widows, who aspired to association with her (cf. Harness, Chap. 20). It should be obvious that it is not in her beheading action per se that Judith offered a behavioral example for women, but in the strength of character which that action symbolized. A fascinating case of her deployment to support and challenge conventional female social roles simultaneously is that of Angela Merici, who founded the Ursuline nuns as a self-governing and independent community, living together on their own, not enclosed in convents. In the “Regola” which constituted the order in 1535, Merisi charged her followers to guard their virtue and behave bravely, as Judith did when she beheaded Holofernes, and to anticipate a triumphant reception in heaven.33 A further develop-ment can be noted in seventeenth-century England, where the example of 31 These extend back at least as far as the sixth-century Greek chronicle by John Malalas. See Elena Ciletti, “Patriarchal Ideology in the Renaissance Iconography of Judith,” in Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (eds.), Refiguring Woman: Perspec-tives on Gender and the Italian Renassiance (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1991), pp. 35–70, especially pp. 45–46.
32 See, e.g., Caroline Murphy, Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and Her Patrons in Six-teenth-Century Bologna (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003);
Flavio Caroli, Fede Galizia (Turin: Allemandi, 1989).
33 Querciolo Mazzonis, Spirituality, Gender and the Self in Renaissance Italy: Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula (1474–1540) (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Uni-versity Press, 2007), pp. 63–4. The Ursulines were soon forced to accept enclosure.
Judith provided Quaker women with validation for their desire to preach (cf. Bartholomew, Chap. 14). It would seem that the very malleability of Judith was available for women to appropriate, perhaps aided by the dic-tum of Lodovico Dolce in 1545 that Judith, the model widow, was a per-sonification of the vita attiva and the vita contemplativa both.34
The cultural history of Judith in this period reveals an intersection of diverse voices across many media. The “Querelle des Femmes” was a popu-lar genre that flourished in complex relationship to contemporary comport-ment literature, which was itself a subset of theological discourse. We have here the convergence and the opposition of differing and hotly contested conceptions of women and their duties. The prominence of ruling queens, female princes, overturned conventional definitions of the female sphere and ideals of feminine agency. Judith provided ammunition for both sides of this debate, on whatever terrain it played out. The Quaker women who used her to defend their right to preach, for instance, battled those who took exactly the opposite position. Factional warfare complicated the mat-ter for queens and their apologists, as indeed for everyone. As William St.
Clair observed, it would seem that “the political and ecclesiastical commis-sioners of Judith presentations were themselves trying to navigate between competing discursive frameworks that they themselves sometimes wanted to preserve and sometimes to jettison.”35 Not surprisingly, the figurative results are marked by dissonance. The corpus of Judith’s representations, visual and literary, reveals tensions between irresolvable extremes.
If the interpretive amplification of the Judith and Holofernes story is a feature of early modern culture, its protagonists were not alone among the characters in the saga to undergo this treatment. Judith’s maidservant too was affected. One of the most often noted aspects of the iconography is the
If the interpretive amplification of the Judith and Holofernes story is a feature of early modern culture, its protagonists were not alone among the characters in the saga to undergo this treatment. Judith’s maidservant too was affected. One of the most often noted aspects of the iconography is the