Panel

Cranach the Elder, Lucas, studio from Germany St Judith with the head of Holofernes 1530

The obviously rather bloodthirsty woman holding a sword and part of her ’victim is Judith. She is the heroine of the ’Book of Judith’, a story termed apocryphal’ because it has Christian subject matter but was never canonized and hence never became part of the Bible. Judith was the brave widow who saved her people, the Israelites, when an Assyrian army besieged her home town of Bethulia. She gained access to the camp of the enemy under the pretext of being a traitor. She then had dinner with general Holofernes and, when he had fallen asleep drunk, she cut off his head with a sword. The leaderless Assyrian army fled and the Israelites were saved. Judith is portrayed wearing rather extraordinary clothes. The painter, Lucas Cranach the Elder, must have thought that wealthy people of the East in Judith’s day wore outfits like this. They are, however, fantasy clothes. The woman’s head seems rather small in comparison to the size of her body; this small-headedness’ is a typical feature of Cranach’s style.  It seems as though the artist had initially painted her lower down: her dress seems to have been previously painted through under the gold of the table.