Judith and the Head of Holofernes

Wtewael traveled to Italy in his youth and would have known that the Old Testament heroine Judith was a popular subject for Catholic artists from Donatello to Caravaggio. For this Dutch Calvinist artist, Judith is probably an allegorical symbol of the victory of God’s chosen people over an enemy — the Dutch Protestants, who considered themselves the successors of the Jewish people, declared their independence from Spain in 1579. Here, Judith, dressed in acidic colors with her gown open at the navel, holds the sword with which she struck the blow. Her splayed fingers are reminiscent of the artificial poses favored by the influential artist ­Bartholomeus Spranger (1546–1611). The maid­servant peers at the body as Judith rests a hand on his head and raises her eyes to heaven. The purchase of this work marked the beginning of a series of acquisitions of Dutch Mannerist paintings that has made the Museum the richest repository for such works in America and, arguably, anywhere outside the Netherlands. The Museum was thus in the vanguard of the revaluation and study of northern European art around the year 1600, the age of Shakespeare in England, an era that has profoundly marked the modern English-speaking world. As perhaps the Museum’s most extreme painting exemplifying the ornamental tendencies of the period, <em>Judith and Holofernes</em> has parallels with some of the distortions and displacements in the rhetorical conceits of Elizabethan England and thus enriches our understanding of that culture.

<p>This painting is Wtewael’s interpretation of a Biblical subject that has been variously depicted for centuries. It deftly bridges the didactic nature of the traditional Christian interpretation of Judith in the Netherlands as pious and chaste to Judith’s rebirth as a strong, sexual woman and liberator from tyranny. While this painting’s attribution has been and continues to be debated, credited to painters like Cornelis van Haarlem and Abraham Bloemaert, there is little doubt that the Princeton Judith exemplifies the ‘stylish style’ of Northern Mannerism for which Wtewael was known. She is painted here with a silvery tone and a diverse palette of unusual and acidic colors, and her contorted, voluptuous figure ripples with muscularity.</p><p><em><strong>Matthew Pickering, Class of 2024</strong></em></p>