Abstract (eng)
In the iconographic development of Judith and Holofernes within the art of the Italian Renaissance, the biblical heroine and Old Testament story have demonstrated powerful symbolic elasticity. Judith first emerges in Florence as a patriotic and communal symbol of virtue, traveling southwards at the turn of the 16th century and becoming increasingly more decorative, idealized and non-political, eventually gaining popularity in the form of contem-porary Venetian portraiture. Venice also develops a new stylistic motif for the portrayal of the rhetorical contrast between Judith and her maid. Michelangelo stands as one of the first artists to transport Judith to Rome, and contributes a critical and innovative adaptation of the biblical subject which will be continually referenced in the century to follow. Overall, elements of the Medieval tradition persevere throughout the Renaissance. The Northern provinces, and most prominently the city of Florence, are established as the true birthplace of the iconography of Judith and Holofernes within Italy.
The Baroque master Caravaggio is identified as the first artist since the Renaissance to represent the decapitation of Holofernes at the hands of Judith in a painting dated 1599 and produced in Rome. The biography of Caravaggio illustrates a figure who was masterly and highly innovative in his art, but volatile in his life, and experienced an extraordinary and short-lived career as a painter. Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes is characterized as an early painting from an inexperienced young artist on basis of the many formal inaccuracies and artistic deficiencies apparent, where the traditional rhetorical and religious-symbolic functions of the painting are equally underdeveloped or intentionally neglected. Caravaggio’s approach to realism is defined as selective and fundamentally flawed, his extreme chiaroscuro employed in his early work as a stylistic device to resolve such flaws. Despite these deficiencies, the representation of realism and gore within Judith is drastic in comparison with contemporary renderings of the same biblical subject, and requires analysis on a more macrocosmic level to better contextualize the painting.
The pictorial models for Caravaggio’s Judith are abundant. The artist’s childhood and training in the artistic traditions of the North proves greatly influential, the Renaissance painting and theory of Giorgione and the gore of Piazza in particular. Once in Rome, the
post-Tridentine demand for bloody images of martyrdom provide ample inspiration for Caravaggio. The artist’s friendship with Prosperino Orsi, the notorious painter of the gro-tesque, may have also had an indirect impact on his approach to the sacred image. Caravag-gio’s depiction of Medusa’s head functions as the artist’s first essay in decapitation, whereby the integrality of Leonardo’s artistic theories is further implicated. Ultimately, Caravaggio’s greatest source of visual inspiration for his graphic depiction of Judith can be found in the historical realities of Rome during the Counter Reformation, which included innumerable beheadings, burnings, dismemberments and tortures which were sanctioned by the Catholic Church and regularly placed on public display, and most poignantly the famous execution of the Cenci family, which took place the same year that Judith was produced.
Following Judith, Caravaggio revisits the subject of decapitation in multiple works of various biblical subjects, his later paintings exhibiting a subtlety and refinement which demonstrate his artistic growth. Caravaggio’s compulsion for self-insertion also continues into his later paintings of decapitation, becoming progressively more overt and morbid and intimately mirroring his own darkening psychological state. The artist’s unexpected death garners him more celebrity and unofficial followers, many of which adapt the realism, drama and brutality of his style to their own depictions of Judith. Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes ultimately revolutionizes the representation of the biblical subject in art, and sets the stage for the masters of the Baroque and the many gory depictions to follow.