Art Institute of Chicago

Judith

Barthel Beham

Date

1525

Medium

Engraving in black on ivory laid paper

Culture

Germany

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

The stalwart heroine of the Book of Judith from the Hebrew Apocrypha, the beautiful widow Judith seduced and beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes, whose forces had besieged her city, in order to save her people. Depicted here in the nude, she sits triumphantly on Holofernes’s corpse, with a firm grip on her sword and the disembodied head. Judith was the rare female leader to be celebrated as such during this period.

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