Murderous Vamp or Noble Heroine:

Exploring Judith’s Symbolic Role in the Arts

Although she is famous for beheading a man, is Judith a noble heroine or a lusty femme fatale? The fictional biblical narrative of Judith beheading Holofernes is a popular subject in the arts depicted by well-known painters and writers throughout the ages. Variation in early depictions of the widowed heroine, Judith, ranging from illuminated manuscripts to a 14th-century fresco, each represent contrasting cultural attitudes about heroism and women’s autonomy.

According to Holy Roman text, Judith is a fictional Jewish widow who uses her charm and beauty to gain the trust of an invading Assyrian general, Holofernes.[i] Judith pretends to be an ally to the Assyrians and divulges information about the Hebrew people. She gets Holofernes drunk while entertaining him and his men. Once he retreated to his bed for the night, Judith and her handmaiden snuck into his tent to behead the drunken ogre Holofernes with a sword. She placed the General’s head in a cloth sack and carried it back to Bethulia. Judith showed Holofernes’s dismembered head to her fellow countrymen, and ultimately inspired the men of Bethulia to fight back against the invaders to preserve their homeland. After defeating the heathenish invaders, Judith remains chaste and never remarries.

Interpretations of the Book of Judith evolved throughout time to represent personal feelings of rebellion stirred up by geo-political conflicts. According to E.L. Hicks, Judith originated as a fictional Jewish character who symbolized the Jewish peoples’ fear of oppression from tyrannical rulers like Nebuchadnezzar and Demetrius. Moreover, Judith’s name itself translates to ‘the daughter of Judah.’[ii] As time passed, Judith’s popularity remained untouched due to her broad relatability. According to Elena Ciletti and Henrike Lähnemann, “As the victorious defender of her people, she [Judith] was inevitably marshaled in struggles against tyrants and enemies, especially foreign “heathens,” and indeed in a wide variety of political and civic arenas.”[iii] For instance, Medieval Anglo-Saxons viewed Judith as a symbol of resistance to the Scandinavian invasion and she epitomized Germanic heroism during a time of religious upheaval, as well as political conflict with the Ottoman Empire. At that time, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III faced persistent threats from the Ottoman Empire and other political opponents. For medieval Germanic citizens, Judith symbolized heroism in the Central European clash with Ottoman oppressors.

Despite her popularity, Judith’s significance in religious text is shaky due to historical disagreements over biblical canon.[iv] In fact, Judith is not considered canon in Judaism or modern Christianity. Although Judith seems as if she could be the epitome of Jewish resistance, St. Jerome suggests the contrary, “Among the Jews, the Book of Judith is considered apocryphal.”[v] Judith’s acceptance into Biblical canon is inconsistent and wavers over time due to shifting attitudes about morality, women’s sexuality, and biblical history. At face value, Judith’s actions are rather unchaste and barbaric; she walks a fine line between noble and immoral, hence St. Jerome’s inclination to write his own version of Judith, which emphasized Judith’s chastity and virtue.

In the preface to his version of the Book of Judith, St. Jerome eloquently pled the case of Judith in Christian canon:

Receive the widow Judith, a paradigm of chastity, and with triumphant laud make her known in perpetual praises.

For not only for women, but also for men, she has been given as a model by the one who rewards her chastity, who has ascribed to her such virtue that she conquered the unconquered among all men and surmounted the unsurmountable.[vi]

Due to Judith’s rather scandalous acts of sexual manipulation and murder — -not to mention the fact that she is undeniably fictional, St. Jerome softened the blow for clerical readers by toning down her sense of sexuality. His version of Judith embodies a classic masculine hero in the form of a chaste widow dedicated to serving God. To avoid conflating Judith’s charm and beauty with promiscuity, St. Jerome made it a point to censor any suggestion of sexual indiscretion and instead focused on gender role reversal. Moreover, St. Jerome’s tale of noble heroism counters Judith’s key role as a murderer due in part to her victory in the end which, “raises her [Judith] to the pinnacle of moral exemplarity.”[vii] As a matter of fact, St. Jerome’s casting of Judith as a chaste, brave heroine inspired Martin Luther to include Judith in his Reformation-era biblical canon. Ciletti explains the establishment of Judith into biblical lore, “She was thereby inscribed within an immense network of emblematic associations, most of which served to neutralize the negative dimensions of her tactics: dissimulation, the shrewd exploitation of her adversary’s sexual presumptions, and violence.” Further, Ciletti asserts that St. Jerome’s praises planted Judith’s historical association with fortitude and justice, as well as wisdom and magnanimity. In essence, St. Jerome’s toned-down interpretation of Judith and Holofernes — -which excluded sexuality and likened Judith to revered, Old Testament darlings, remained popular source material for artists in the medieval period through the Renaissance.

Regardless of canonicity, during times of widespread illiteracy, artists illustrated biblical and oral traditions to communicate the Christian faith. Early artistic depictions liken Judith to the Virgin Mary with similarities in visual appearance and disposition, as seen in Judith Slaying Holofernes ca. 1260. The earliest depiction of Judith is featured in an illuminated manuscript from Alsace titled, Hortus Delicarium by Herrade von Landsberg ca., 1167–1195.[viii] Herrade von Landsberg was an Alsatian nun and early pioneer of female artistry in her own right. Hortus Delicarium: pl. LX: Judith, features line drawings of two key scenes from Judith’s narrative: the beheading of Holofernes and the subsequent parading of his dismembered head in Bethulia.

Very little of the original manuscript survived, but the University of Pittsburgh owns the few pieces that survived destruction from 1870:

“The Hortus Deliciarum was compiled under the direction of the abbess Herrad of Landsberg as an encyclopedic source of knowledge for the nuns of Hohenberg Abbey in Alsace. This ambitious and innovative teaching tool interspersed strikingly original compositions, such as the image of an enthroned personification of Philosophy surrounded by the Seven Liberal Arts, with more conventional illustrations of biblical narratives.”[ix]

True to the period, Judith is dressed modestly in period-appropriate garments and her hair is covered by a cloth wrap, unlike her handmaiden, whose long, flowing mane reaches her feet. Interestingly, blood and gore are absent from the illustration, as each scene depicts an antecedent to Judith’s most violent actions. In the first scene, Judith and her handmaiden stand at the edge of Holofernes’s ornate canopy bed, towering over his pillow. Expressionless, she grips his hair tightly with her left hand to stabilize his head for the dismemberment and her sword is raised with the blade pressed against Holofernes’s chin. In contrast, Judith’s handmaiden nervously looks on with her hands gripping Judith’s shoulders as if she is trying to hide. The second illustration depicts the moment in the story after the beheading, where Judith and her handmaiden carry Holofernes’s head in a sack through the streets of Bethulia.

Jumping forward in time to 1378, Italy where we find a fresco titled, Judith Slaying Holofernes by Guariento Ridolfo.[x] Visual depictions of Judith evolved greatly in the span of about 200 years, in both illustrative quality and characterization. In this painting, there is abundant gore and unsavory imagery which clearly conveys the excruciating pain felt by Holofernes as he is beheaded by surprise. We also get a sense of cold lifelessness from his frozen expression. Judith, on the other hand, has already managed to hack a wedge in Holofernes’s neck, but her sword is drawn in the air, as to deliver another swift blow to the neck. Unlike Judith in the Hortus Delicarium, Ridolfo paints the previously pious widow as an active, fierce warrior with one knee bent as she steps on Holofernes’s dangling arm. Aside from the fierce brutality expressed in Judith’s action, she retains her demure beauty and modesty because her hair is in an updo with a netted head covering. Additionally, she is wearing period accurate dresswear with long sleeves and multiple layers.

When comparing two characterizations of Judith, one might consider the cultural context of the two vastly different, early depictions. For instance, 14th-century Italy was unusually militaristic due to perpetual conflicts. In his book, Warfare and Economy in Renaissance Italy, 1350–1450, William P. Caferro describes the exceedingly harsh realities of life in Italy at the time. Caferro explains, “The period from 1350 to 1450 witnessed unprecedented military activity, characterized by wars of increased cost and scale and the use of expensive mercenary soldiers, who presented a perpetual threat of conflict even in times of peace.”[xi] Without surviving evidence from Ridolfo, himself, one can only guess that the shear brutality of life in Italy during the 1350s contributed to the graphic nature of his depiction. In the same breath, Judith may have symbolized heroism and resistance to brutal, oppressive forces.

[i] Lucas, Peter J. “‘Judith’ and the Woman Hero.” The Yearbook of English Studies 22 (1992): 17–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/3508373.

[ii] Hicks, E. L. “Judith and Holofernes.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 6 (1885): 261–74. https://doi.org/10.2307/623401.

[iii] Ciletti, Elena, and Henrike Lähnemann. “Judith in the Christian Tradition.” In The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies Across the Disciplines, edited by Elena Ciletti, Henrike Lähnemann, and Kevin R. Brine, 1st ed., 41–66. Open Book Publishers, 2010. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vjt5x.5.

[iv] — “Judith in the Christian Tradition.” 44.

[v] — “Judith in the Christian Tradition.” 44–47.

[vi] — “Judith in the Christian Tradition.” 43.

[vii] — “Judith in the Christian Tradition.” 47–48.

[viii] Herrade von Landsberg, d. 1195. Hortus Delicarium: Pl. LX: Judith. 1167–1195 (destroyed 1870). Line drawing. https://jstor.org/stable/community.13731498.

[ix] “A Nostalgic Filter: A University of Pittsburgh Exhibition: Hortus Deliciarum,” A Nostalgic Filter: A University of Pittsburgh Exhibition (University of Pittsburgh, 2015), https://scalar.usc.edu/works/a-nostalgic-filter/hortus-deliciarum.

[x] Guariento, Ridolfo, ca. 1378. Judith Slaying Holofernes. c. 1350. https://jstor.org/stable/community.13611905.

[xi] Caferro, William P. “Warfare and Economy in Renaissance Italy, 1350–1450.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 39, no. 2 (2008): 167–209. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20143817.