Head of the Curve: Judith and

Holofernes Through History

From medieval manuscripts to Caravaggio, from Artemisia to
present day, the Biblical story of Judith slaying her attacker has
grown from a simple morality tale into a symbolic weapon for
political justice.

MutualArt
Follow
Jan 1 · 7 min read
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes (1614–1620)
The Book of Judith’s inclusion in the Bible is a cause of some
ecumenical dispute. Though it is included in the Catholic Old
Testament, it does not appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls nor the
Hebrew Canon. There are those who would sever it from the Old
Testament proper. The Protestant Bible removes the story from
the Testaments, but it appears in the Apocrypha — a sinuous,
incomplete cut.

The narrative contains many historical inaccuracies or

anachronisms — particularly attributing actions and timelines to
Nebuchadnezzar which are in conflict with most other accounts. It
may be, strangely, these very inconsistencies which have
contributed to the story’s enduring relevance, its ever-
contemporary feel. These ahistorical glitches are enough to
remove Judith’s story from the confines of ecclesiastical law, the
dogma of gospel. The story therefore operates more like a fiction
than a fable, Judith more like a symbol than a saint, able to be
adopted and modified slightly in the hands of the artists of each
age without fear of blasphemy. Judith has entered the realm of
story-cycles. Rather than being doctrine, this is a folk-tale. A
ballad. A song. And it’s been sung by some of history’s most
important voices.
Getty Museum Manuscript, LUDWIG XIII 1, FOL. 211V, Austrian, around 1300.

Everybody knows the story by now. Holofernes, commander of the

conquering Assyrian armies, has the Israelites on the ropes.
Frustrated by the ineffectuality of her countrymen, Judith takes
matters into her own hands, using her beauty and intelligence to
ingratiate herself into Holofernes’ camp. After a night of drunken
revelry, during which Holofernes’ behaviour is often read as being
sexually aggressive, Judith beheads the Assyrian soldier while he
sleeps. Without their leader, the conquering forces are wayward,
and the Israelites prevail.
In a depiction from an Austrian manuscript dated around 1300,
now in the collection of the Getty Museum, the emphasis is on
activity and narrative. The arc of the decorative letter seems to
follow the parabolic path of Judith’s sword, fusing language and
gesture. The stripes of blood on the blade and the squirting artery
in Holofernes’ neck set a grisly precedent for the picture’s future
history. Artists through the centuries, though adopting the image
in their own styles and towards their own aesthetic and/or
political ends, have been remarkably consistent in using graphic,
indulgent detail in depicting the scene’s violence. In almost every
instance — whether it’s men painting with that morbid curiosity of
the self-destructive sublime, women painting proto-feminist
visions of self-preserving strength in the face of oppression, or
anyone of any gender recognising the timeless eroticisim of the
Sado-Masochistic — the gore is experienced as catharsis.
Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofornes (1598)

Equally, from this early depiction onwards, Judith’s strength and

physicality are given center stage. Even though miniature and
rudimentary, the manuscript image shows her foot firmly planted,
the grip of her left hand powerful on her victim’s head, and the
right arm emphatically aloft, warrior-like. Flash forward a couple
of hundred years, and Caravaggio retains this muscular version of
Judith. The angle of the figure in Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading
Holofernes (1598) — leaning away from her act as though to
disown it, a determined kind of disgust on her face — means that
the thrust of her sword, the dragging motion of her left hand on
the man’s hair, must all be focused in her forearms. The painting is
a fulcrum around these muscles, duly exposed by Caravaggio and
picked out in the brightest tones of the canvas. A viewer, paying
attention to this painting, will feel the strain in their own anterior
flexors.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes (1610 version)
Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith famously leans into the act,
beheading with a thirst for vengeance. Her first version was
painted in the year Caravaggio, the artist who both influenced and
overshadowed her, died. Its determined sense of self-actualization
may stem from this. Certainly it is imbued with her struggles and
successes in defining herself as a woman artist in the Late
Renaissance. A later version, begun in 1614, coalesces within the
scene the vengeful catharsis of Artemisia’s own victory over her
rapist. Agostino Tassi was tried, convicted, and banished.
Artemisia was tortured with thumbscrews to verify her testimony.
She prevailed.

In her depictions of Judith, Artemisia is in many ways singular,

unique. What she does take from Caravaggio is the bared
forearms, the muscularity of Judith. In an art historical canon full
of sexualized women’s bodies, Judith manages to avoid
objectification without losing the firmness of her embodied
existent. She owns her own muscles and sinews, and she uses
them.
Gustav Klimt, Judith and the Head of Holofernes (1901)
Caravaggio’s Judith, like most of his characters, operates as a
symbol of real-life underworlds. Ordinary people who operate in
darkness, exist within plain interior spaces, shun the ostentation
of color and light, and yet experience inner lives of epic scope and
significance. There’s also, of course, the classic male anal-panic,
the appalled obsession with being penetrated and overcome, the
bittersweet assertion of the self which climaxes only when the self
is destroyed.

Artemisia Gentileschi uses many of the same pictorial techniques

and atmospheres, but reclaims positional perspective. She paints
women out of the corner and into the centre stage. She exacts
bodily revenge on men.

But apart from the often (over)emphasized biographical

significance, she also makes great strides in technique and vision.
She has a greater command of physics and internal tension than
her predecessor. The weight of her bodies is more ‘felt’ than
Caravaggio’s. The spurt of Holofernes’ blood in her later painting
follows Galileo’s new mathematical laws of parabolic motion. The
fluid mechanics of the blood staining and running over the sheets
is better realized. This painting fuses art and science. Caravaggio
paints inward. Artemisia paints towards the future.
Error! Filename not specified.
Franz Stuck, Judith (1928)
And in that future, Judith remained entwined in a symbolic matrix
of politics and sex. The notorious mention of her story in Leopold
von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novella, Venus in Furs, paved the way
for a fin-de-siecle reimagining of Judith as the sexual ideal of a
masochistic sexual impulse. The story became a maelstrom of
Freudian energy, linked, by the time it came to Gustav Klimt, with
material opulence.

Klimt’s Judith and the Head of Holofernes (1901) shows Judith

hypersexualized, but not at all ‘objectified.’ She stands head-on to
the painting’s frame, seemingly entirely in control of how much of
her figure is and isn’t visible. She is not being depicted — she’s
revealing herself to you on her own terms. Of course, this ‘strong
woman’ ideal is potentially problematic in its own ways. But
Klimt’s picture has this overarching sense: the kaleidoscopic
redefinition of art and human beings, socially and sexually, as the
world crested into the Modern. This heavily influenced Franz
Stuck’s 1928 version.

The gold-leaf of Klimt’s painting calls all the way back to the gold-
leaf used to frame and emphasize the scene in the 1300s
manuscript. The patterning calls even further back into Byzantium
and Ancient Egypt. The pictorial tensions between geometry and
fluidity, three-dimensions and two, look forward into abstract
expressionism and high modernism. Judith, who cleaved head
from body, and severed women’s ties to their socially-imposed
roles, is the perfect symbol for this conflicting, amorphous,
advancing sense of the new.

Error! Filename not specified.

Alexander Melamid and Vitaly Komar, Judith on the Red Square (1993)

Many definitive versions of the Judith picture appear at the turn of

a Century: the Austrian manuscript in 1300; Caravaggio’s version
(1598) and Gentileschi’s (1610) straddling the same boundary 300
years later; Klimt at that most enormous divide, when history fell
away and modernity took hold, in the first year of the 20th
century; Russian artists Alexander Melamid and Vitaly Komar, in
their Judith on the Red Square (1993) casting Stalin in the
Holofernes role as the end of the second Millennium breathes
down everyone’s necks. The simultaneous ‘crisis of self’ and
‘assertion of self’ which grips the scene causes artists to return to
this story in times of historic revolution.

In the King James Bible version of the story, when Holofernes

offers Judith wine on the fateful night of the murder, she speaks
directly: “I will drink now, my lord, because my life is magnified in
me this day more than all the days since I was born.” Judith knows
the significance of her act. In this story, our lives are magnified
within ourselves.

For more articles, auctions, exhibitions, and current art trends,

visit MutualArt.com