Start - JUDITH: One figure, many women

Introduction: Judith in Western Art and Culture

The book of Judith is one of the three books of the Old Testament name after a woman, and next to other figures as Susanna, Esther and Ruth, she is one of the Jewish heroin’s in the Biblical tradition. In spite of being absent from the Jewish canon, Judith’s book became part of the Christian tradition, initially as part of the Septuagint and later in St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible in the fifth century. 

Judith’s story and heroic deed have been an exceptionally popular subject in the cultural production of the west, from the Early Middle Ages up to the present. Her book has inspired numerous works in the realm of the visual arts, as well as in literature, theater, opera, and later, film; it has been the subject of multiple kinds of artworks, from illuminations in manuscripts, to paintings, engravings, sculptures, tapestries, and even furniture and jewelry.

Such popularity might have been due to the multiple narrative and visual possibilities that this story offers, as well as the different facet of Judith’s prismatic figure. She is, or can be, all at the same time, a heroine and murderer, a savior and a temptress, an example of obedience and Justice, and fearless woman that transgresses the conventions of female behavior. Thus, her story has been interpreted under many different lenses trough history, acquired varied meanings and functions.

The ambivalences of Judith’s figure started to be explored and exploited in the Renaissance and the Early Modern Period by artists working in different media, offering new readings that went beyond the significations attached to this heroine in the Middle Ages. The diffusion of visual representations of Judith in Western culture found its zenith during the Reformation, and the huge corpus of work Judith images produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has not been surpassed.

This exhibition examines diverse aspects of this exploration, going through some of the many shapes and even roles given to Judith’s person in Western art from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.  These multiple and in many cases conflicting interpretations do not only reflect the particular interests of the artists behind these works or the aesthetic investigations of different artistic periods. More importantly, they are imbedded in social, political and concerns beyond them.