Judith as Anti-Heroine in Renaissance and Baroque Art

Abstract

The apocryphal scriptures from the Book of Judith describe a woman respected and honoured in a community under patriarchal rule. The heroine also proves herself to be God-fearing, faithful and brave in her killing of a powerful and previously undefeated warrior, Holofernes. Judith's widowhood leaves her independent and chaste, but despite this physical and spiritual purity, she is depicted as a sinner rather than a saint in art from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. To compile information on such an unusual character, research was conducted on a variety of subjects including the female hero, virtues and vices, iconography from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, social history, individual works of art, and the religious context of Judith; both the character and the book in the Apocrypha. These topics were located in the Apocrypha, writings of the Church Fathers, Medieval manuscripts, articles, journals, essays, catalogues and books. Special mention must be made of the three essays that shed the most illumination on Judith in art; Elena Ciletti's Patriarchal Ideology in the Renaissance Iconography of Judith. Mary Garrard's chapter on Judith in her book Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art, and "Judith: Story, Image, and Symbol" in The Message of Images by Jan Bialostocki. To research the topic further, I visited numerous galleries in England and Europe where many of the paintings I sighted were not mentioned in my research or were unavailable in reproductions. This investigation considers the reason for Judith's development from saint to sinner through a basic understanding of the progress of art history, feminist theory, and Michael Carter's notion of a "painting as text" where each time a picture is sighted, it is interpreted in a new or different manner. The combination is an important one, as through it, we are able to understand fully the developing characterisation of Judith in art. Judith is interpreted by the figures that surround her (Abra and Holofernes), her setting, and her appearance, but the point at which this changes occurs on the brink of the Renaissance. It is at this time that Judith ceases to be an embodiment of Virtue sharing a similar iconography, and when, because of the changing nature of art and the decline in popularity of the continuous narrative, the heroine is left with little or no literal context. Because of this lack of context, Judith is judged on her appearance; an appearance radically altered from her usual one in an effort to fool Holofernes. It fools not only Holofernes, but her viewing audience also because of an interpretation which can be based on appearance only. She is a woman misunderstood, and as such is typical of women throughout history; both in art and reality.