Judith and Holofernes

It is some distant time in history. The Jews are in danger. A young and beautiful Jewish woman faces an extraordinary opportunity: to inf luence a powerful, gentile ruler in favour of her people by using her beauty and feminine wisdom. Will she agree? Will she succeed in turning the king's heart? Will such rescue be worth the intimacy with a gentile? Such questions and others have informed the retellings and reiterations of what we might characterize as Esther-like narratives that appeared repeatedly in Hebrew and Yiddish literature from the late nineteenth century up to World War II.

At no point in the apocryphal text does Judith, a wise and beautiful Jewish widow, sit on Holofernes, the Assyrian general laying siege to her city. Yet, in 1525, Barthel Beham, a young artist from Nuremberg, created Judith Seated on the Body of Holofernes, an engraving in which a voluptuous nude Judith sits atop Holofernes’s nude torso. Neither the textual nor the visual traditions explain Beham’s choice to perch the chaste woman on top of her slain enemy, so what sources inspired the printmaker? What is the meaning of Judith’s provocative position? The tiny printed image depicts the relationship between a male figure and a female figure. Thus, in order to appreciate the complexity of that relationship, I begin this thesis by reviewing what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a woman in early sixteenth-century Germany. Because gender roles and the dynamics between the sexes were so complex, I encourage scholars to reevaluate Weibermacht (Power of Women) imagery. The nudity...

The apocryphal history of Judith and Holofernes has always attracted and fascinated artists and art lovers over the centuries. The reproduction, both of the beheading of Holofernes and of the moments before and after this act, are among the religious scenes most represented throughout the history of art (painting, sculpture, literature and music) surviving even and resisting until the twentieth century. Artists such as Palma Vecchio, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Donatelo, Botticelli, Gustav Klimt and many others contributed to this episode, which is part of Western cultural imagery, as a recurrent theme of the historiography of art, crossing the centuries and being an essential part of the construction of their own identity and western culture.

The aim is to discover the bible story of Judith and Holofernes, and why the Baroque period, concreted by the Italian painter Michelangelo da Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi was the liveliest period of the theme.

Initial research was based on the book, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art, written by Mary Garrard. Further research was expanded by reading primary sources, such as the Story of Judith in the books of the Christian Old Testament, and scholarly journal articles within the fields of the biblical Judith and Gentileschi’s life.

I also take as a reference and which is quite important, since it complements and emphasises the explanation of these works and are Wolfflin's "Fundamental Concepts of Art", which is a generalisation that explains the artistic works of Baroque Five points of view, that are: the linear and pictorial, surface and depth, closed form and open form, plurality and unity, clear and indistinct. These elements as I had already mentioned, are important because in a way, complement and end up being a more concrete way of analysing such works. And finally, a reflection on the image of Judith rather than on the symbolic context, a look at women as such since those times, and their connotation.

In the mid-1400s, the Medici family displayed two bronze sculptures by Donatello in their courtyard: his David, and his Judith and Holofernes. This paper focuses on ways of seeing in Renaissance Florence, in particular how Donatello's Judith represented the Medici, and how Judith as a figure came to represent the republic of Florence.

WONDER WOMEN: SOFONISBA ANGUISSOLA, LAVINIA FONTANA AND ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE SELF-PORTRAIT PAINTING BY FEMALE ARTISTS

by Rosa Lena Reed Robinson

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts in Art History at
Studio Art Centers International
Florence, Italy

2017


This  thesis is focused on the self-portrait painting practice by three female artists from the Renaissance and the Baroque periods: Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Chapter I introduces the self-portrait as it developed specific to the Renaissance and in relation to a Greco-Roman classical ideal. The chapter focuses on Renaissance concepts of art and the very role of the artist. Chapter II studies the numerous self-portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola, the first great Renaissance female artist to have an international career. The artist’s self-portraits both became a foundation for those of later female artists and self-consciously expressed the new elite status achieved by this Lombard artist of noble lineage who worked as court portraitist for the Spanish monarchy. Chapter III examines the self-portraits and innovative identity self-portraiture of Lavinia Fontana of Bologna. It is demonstrated how her two early self-portraits built on the precedent established by Sofonisba, and yet, are of somewhat greater iconographic complexity. While in her maturity the artist developed self-portraiture into the identity self-portrait through the subject of Judith and Holofernes. Within her treatments of the theme in some examples she put herself into the figure of Judith and in others into Judith’s maid Abra. Lavinia Fontana’s final masterpiece, the improbable painting Minerva Dressing done at the end of her extensive career was likewise arguably an identity self-portrait. Minerva Dressing constitutes the first female fully nude figure painted by a female artist. Chapter IV focuses on Artemisia Gentileschi. This thesis designates the artist’s Pommersfelden Susanna and the Elders as both Artemisia’s first exact self-portrait and the first female full-length nude self-portrait painted by a female artist. The work is also an identity self-portrait. This chapter continues with a discussion of both versions of Artemisia’s infamous Judith and Holofernes (Capodimonte/Uffizi). Both works are arguably exact self-portrait paintings and identity self-portraits. Artemisia’s Allegory of Painting in London, often referred to as a self-portrait in scholarship, is suggested a perhaps better understood as an ideal identity self-portrait rather than a literal self-representation. The Allegory of Painting is considered together with other attributed self-portraits and portraits of the artist. A major theme in Chapter IV is the transition from literal self-representation to allegorical and ideal portrayal of the self. This thesis suggests that, as the artist’s career advanced, Artemisia Gentileschi did continue to paint both the exact and the ideal self-portrait. Finally, in the Conclusion, the legacy of the self-portraits of the Wonder Women, to adopt a phrase from Giorgio Vasari, is considered in reference to future female artists such as Elisabetta Sirani, Angelica Kauffmann, Elisabeth Vigée Le-Brun and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

At no point in the apocryphal text does Judith, a wise and beautiful Jewish widow, sit on Holofernes, the Assyrian general laying siege to her city. Yet, in 1525, Barthel Beham, a young artist from Nuremberg, created Judith Seated on the Body of Holofernes, an engraving in which a voluptuous nude Judith sits atop Holofernes's nude torso. Neither the textual nor the visual traditions explain Beham's choice to perch the chaste woman on top of her slain enemy, so what sources inspired the printmaker? What is the meaning of Judith's provocative position? The tiny printed image depicts the relationship between a male figure and a female figure. Thus, in order to appreciate the complexity of that relationship, I begin this thesis by reviewing what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a woman in early sixteenth-century Germany. Because gender roles and the dynamics between the sexes were so complex, I encourage scholars to reevaluate Weibermacht (Power of Women) imagery. The nudity of Beham's Judith and her intimate proximity to Holofernes suggest that Judith Seated on the Body of Holofernes is a Weibermacht print. In fact, Judith's pose specifically echoes that of Phyllis riding Aristotle, a popular Weibermacht narrative. The combined eroticism of Judith's exposed body and her compromising position would have appealed broadly to male viewers, but Beham likely targeted an erudite audience of well-educated, affluent men when he designed the multivalent print. Through close visual analysis and careful consideration of which prints circulated in early sixteenth-century Nuremberg, I argue that Beham's Judith resembles witches riding backwards on goats, crouching Venuses, and a woman in the "reverse-cowgirl" sex position. Admittedly, it is impossible to know which sources Beham studied in preparation for Judith Seated on the Body of Holofernes, but I am inclined to believe that he wanted each of those jocular references to enrich the meaning of his work, providing a witty commentary on the power of women. But regardless of the artist's intentionality, I think visually literate viewers would have recognized and enjoyed decoding the layers of meaning in Beham's odd engraving.

En 1910 el escritor gallego Ramón Goy de Silva publicó, en la revista Prometeo, dirigida por R. Gómez de la Serna, su "Judith. Poema épico", una breve e interesante pieza dramática de carácter simbolista. Este artículo comenta esta obra y la pone en relación con el mito de Judith, valorando otras varios textos dramáticos sobre el personaje, que en el Modernismo hispánico se confunde tantas veces con Salomé. Usa varios referentes pictóricos en los que Goy de Silva pudo inspirarse para crear a su Judith.

Among the most enigmatic compositions in Lucas Cranach’s oeuvre are his Biblical decapitations of the 1530s. In 1531, he executed a pair of panels depicting the story of Judith and Holofernes; between 1531 and 1539, he and his workshop produced four paintings of the Feast of Herod of nearly identical composition and size. Through the decade, Cranach and his shop painted half- to full-length images of the princess Salome alone that are almost indistinguishable from his contemporaneous half-length paintings of Judith. I propose that Cranach’s narrative paintings should be understood as allegories; they were veiled references to the tyranny of the imperial court and were intended for the Lutheran prince-electors in the years following the Diet of Augsburg. His half-length images of Judith and Salome proliferated because both subjects connoted the downfall of tyrannical forces. Cranach thus skillfully adapted rarefied political iconography to imagery that served a broad Reformation audience.

The great painter Lucas Cranach the Elder, painted two of the best well known biblical stories Salomé and Judith. In his paintings the muse used might even be considered the same as well as the heads on the  plateau. What drives a painter to paint in this violent way?

The Hebraic heroine Judith, one of the most important femmes fatales of the Bible, has inspired numerous artistic depictions, such as Federico Della Valle's Baroque tragedy Iudit (1627). It is the story of a valiant heroine who seeks to liberate the people of Bethulia from the tyranny of the enemy general Holofernes by seducing and eventually decapitating him with his own sword. This contribution proposes to interpret Della Valle's adaptation of the deuterocanonical myth on multiple levels: In light of the historical background of the Counter-Reformation, Judith can firstly be read as an allegorical representation of the Catholic Church upon whom God bestowed his power to fight against the enemy (the Protestants). Secondly, the tragedy explores the power of seduction of image and word and thus reflects on the dynamics of desire that springs from aesthetic pleasure. In this perspective, Judith becomes a piece of art, an image to be looked at and an object of the male gaze. The third approach to Della Valle's tragedy will therefore be a psychoanalytical and feminist reading of the gender dynamics and power relations at play between the heroine and Holofernes, focusing on the question whether Della Valle's Judith can be framed as a feminist idol avant la lettre.

The unusual iconography of Titian’s Salome at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome (ca. 1515-1516) has long puzzled art historians. In recent years, some have argued that the painting represents Judith with the head of Holofernes, or that it has no definable subject matter at all. Early documentary evidence, however, overwhelmingly suggests that the subject of Titian’s painting was intended and understood as Salome. The painting’s iconography is elusive because it does not depend on one textual source, such as the Gospels. Much like Giorgione before him, Titian drew upon composite literary and artistic traditions for his work. In this article I review the evidence offered by early inventories that the Doria Pamphilj painting was understood as Salome. I explore the work’s iconographic foundations in northern Italian, devotional images of Salome and Giorgione’s paintings of David and Judith. I examine artistic and literary representations of love and dismemberment in the early Cinquecento. Finally, I place Titian’s Salome in the context of his paintings of beautiful women, which incorporate poetic themes and motifs. In his Salome, Titian synthesizes references not just to the work of his contemporaries in the field of painting, but to the poets and writers of his day, aligning his own achievements with some of the most popular poetic representations of the tragic power of love.

Born from a Yoruba father (Nigeria) and an Afro-American mother, Kehinde Wiley is becoming, at just forty years of age, one of the most politically relevant New York artist of his generation. Boasting a technique worthy of the great masters, and a sharp critical wit, Wiley make uses of art history to present an empowered depiction of populations who normally only appears in it through the orientalist gaze of those who dominate them.