Judith  

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The Book of Judith is the biblical parable of Judith who is an early incarnation of the femme fatale and a pretext to depict decapitation in art.

The story revolves around Judith, a daring and beautiful widow, who is upset with her Jewish countrymen for being unwilling to engage their foreign conquerors. She goes with her loyal if reluctant maid Abra to the camp of the enemy general, Holofernes, to whom she slowly ingratiates herself, promising him both sexual favors and information on the Israelites. Gaining his trust (though not having delivered on either promise), she is allowed access to his tent one night as he lays in a drunken stupor. She decapitates him, then takes his head back to her fearful countrymen. The Assyrians, having lost their leader, disperse, and Israel is saved by the hand of a woman. Though she is courted by many, she remains unmarried and pure for the rest of her life.

Judith in later artistic renditions

In the Renaissance, the story of Judith became an exemplum of the courage of local people against tyrannical rule from afar. The Dalmatian Humanist Marko Marulić (1450-1524) reworked the Judith story in his Renaissance literary work, Judita. His inspiration came from the contemporary heroic struggle of the Croats against the Ottomans in Europe.

Judith and Holofernes, the famous bronze sculpture by Donatello, bears the implied allegorical subtext that was inescapable in Early Renaissance Florence, that of the courage of the commune against tyranny. Michelangelo painted Judith in the corner of the Sistine chapel. Other Italian painters who took up the theme include Botticelli, Giorgione, Titian, Paolo Veronese, Caravaggio, Leonello Spada, Bartolomeo Manfredi and Artemisia Gentileschi. In the north, Lucas Cranach, Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens used the story. In European art, Judith is normally accompanied by her maid at her shoulder, which helps to distinguish her from Salome, who also carries her head on a silver charger (plate). However a Northern tradition developed whereby Judith had both a maid and a charger, famously taken by Erwin Panofsky as an example of the knowledge needed in the study of iconography.

In the Renaissance, especially in Germany an interest developed in female "worthies" and heroines, to match the traditional male sets. Subjects combining sex and violence were also popular with collectors. Like Lucretia, Judith was the subject of a disproportionate number of old master prints, sometimes shown nude. Barthel Beham engraved three compositions of the subject, and other of the "Little Masters" did several more. Jacopo de' Barberi, Girolamo Mocetta after a Mantegna design, Parmigianino, and Jacques Callot also made prints of the subject. The first reproductive print of his work commissioned by Rubens was an engraving by Cornelius Galle of his violent "large Judith", now in the Palazzo Barberini.

Alessandro Scarlatti wrote an oratorio in 1693, La Giuditta; Juditha triumphans was written in 1716 by Antonio Vivaldi; Mozart composed in 1771 La Betulia Liberata (KV 118), to a libretto by Pietro Metastasio. Judith is by Russian composer Alexander Serov.

In 1841 Friedrich Hebbel published his closet drama Judith, but in the English language, blanket censorship of all biblical subjects on the stage set the theme off-limits until the twentieth century, when the British playwright Howard Barker examined the Judith story and its aftermath, first in the scene "The Unforeseen Consequences of a Patriotic Act," as part of his collection of vignettes, The Possibilities. Barker later expanded the scene into a short play Judith.