In Our Time - Judith beheading Holofernes

Episode Date: February 14, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how artists from the Middle Ages onwards have been inspired by the Bible story of the widow who killed an Assyrian general who was besieging her village, and so saved her people from his army and from his master Nebuchadnezzar. A symbol of a woman's power and the defiance of political tyranny, the image of Judith has been sculpted by Donatello, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and, in the case of Caravaggio, Liss and Artemisia Gentileschi, been shown with vivid, disturbing detail. What do these interpretations reveal of the attitudes to power and women in their time, and of the artists' own experiences? The image of Judith, above is from a tapestry in the Duomo, Milan, by Giovanni or Nicola Carcher, 1555With Susan Foister Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at the National GalleryJohn Gash Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of AberdeenAnd Ela Nutu Hall Research Associate at the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, at the University of SheffieldProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Judith was once one of the most famous women in the Old Testament. She saved her people, Israel, by killing an enemy general, single-handed. It was the manner of our killing that inspired countless artists, including Caravaggio, Gentilesky,

climped. The general was Holofernes, and he fought for Nebuchadnezzar. He was besieging Judith's village, yet Judith, a beautiful young widow, went to his tent, delighted him, and when she had made him drunk, she cut off his head with his own sword. His army fled. For centuries, Judith symbolized the strong woman, or humility overcoming pride, or the weak defeating tyrants, or the danger of the femme fatal. She was sometimes virtuous, like Mary, sometimes deceitful, like Eve, yet always raised questions about where the power between men and women. With me to discuss Judith and the paintings are Susan Poister,

curator of early Netherlands, German and British painting at the National Gallery, John Gash, Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Aberdeen, and Eleanutu Hall, Research Associate at the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffield. Susan Poister, what was the story of Judith in the Bible? Well, the story that's told is quite a dramatic one. It's Judith, who was a widow, had decided that, inspired by God, she would go out to the tent of the enemy general Holofernes,

whose troops were besieging her town of Bethelia. It doesn't seem to have been a real town, but it was a crucial town on the way to Jerusalem. So she had the idea inspired by God that she would be able to save Israel from the Assyrians. So she took off the sackcloth that she normally wore as a widow, and she dressed herself up with an inordinate amount of jewelry in order to embellish her beauty and set off for the camp of the enemy.

With her servant? With her servant, with her female servant. And she there persuaded the enemy that she could actually tell them how they could take her town. She told a tale that said that the Israelites were going to sin by eating sacred food that had been set aside, especially for them, and she would lead them to victory.

And she stayed there for three days, with her own supply of food, she wasn't going to actually take the Assyrians food. And then on the fourth day, Holofernies decided that he would invite her to sup with him in his tent and she went in there, she ate only her own food and drink, he drank a lot of wine and as a result, she alone was able to take down his sword, overpower him,

cut off his head, the Bible tells us, with two blows. After that, she took out the head to her maid, put it in a sack, took it back to Bethune, and displayed his head on the ramparts. And after that, the Assyrians fled in fear, and the Israelites conquered them. When did this appear in which Bible, and in which Bible is it now? Well, now it's in the apocrypha.

So for the Protestants, it's not part of the regular Bible, but for the Catholics, it is still part of the Bible as the Book of Judith. And what credence do you give to it? You talked about the village of Bethulia being fiction. What else do you think was fiction? Well, in general, people seem not to have been able to pin down this story to any kind of historical source. It seems rather doubtful how it actually arose as a text in the first place

of what language it was in. Is it doubtful that there's a Judith? I think it is quite doubtful. There was a Judith, but there is a very good story in there that was certainly taken up over history for a very long period. And he was taken up very strongly, wasn't it? Very strongly indeed, yes. So that's the story, and you think it's near enough accurate?

Well, we don't really know, I don't think. But that's what we're going to talk about for the rest of the program, so we'll work on that premise. If anybody has stronger feelings, I'm sure they'll tell us along the way. Ella, there were other virtuous women mentioned alongside Judith in the Middle Ages, there was Yale and Esther. How did she compare with them? Well, it's interesting because Judith was constantly associated with other virtues women,

like the ones you've just numbered, particularly with Yale, because Yale also delivers the Israelites from a colonizing army by killing their general, Cicero. And she kills him in very similar fashion in the sense that she invites him in, into her tent. there's some meal involved, he falls asleep, and then she drives a tent peg through his temple, which is very interesting.

And it is she who secures the victory of the Israelites in that respect by delivering Cicera's dead body. But then in its impact is not as strong as that of Judith, simply because the murder itself is very domesticated. It is she who invites Cicera in, and her own tent is she who provides succor and comfort to him. She issues the invitation, whereas with Judith, that is Holofernes's tent, Holoferneses invitation, and indeed Holofernes's sword, whereas, you know, the tent peg is very female, very domesticated.

So that's Yale. And politically, the impact is lesser as well because Cicero had already been defeated. So that's one thing. Esther, yes, she too delivers the Israelites from a... you know, genocide, indeed the Holocaust in those days. And Esther, too, uses her beauty and her femininity, her status, to secure that, you know, the survival of her people. But then with Esther, she's doubly colonized in that respect.

Esther is the closeted Jewess. You know, she doesn't tell anybody that she's Jewish until the very end. She uses the power of her husband. She is the queen, you know, and she, it's a... It is her body that is actually rubbed and oiled and stretched for the pleasure of the king. And whereas with Judith, she refuses to be colonized. As Susan Mention, she brings her own kosher food with her in her bag. She refuses to break bread with her enemy.

She refuses to actually eat with them. And even though Judith does use her beauty as much as Esther does, there is no pleasuring the king. There's no pleasuring hell of fairness as far as the book. concerned. In the count I've read it says of Holofherne's after she had delighted him. What does that mean?

I don't think she delighted him carnily. I think the Bible says something like he drank a large quantity of wine more than he'd ever drunk before in his life and he was and this is beautiful, he was dead drunk

so he was sprawled on his bed there's no indication that Judith took her clothes off at all. So what does this phrase mean? I think her beauty delighted him. But we never know, really. But that stuck with her, didn't it?

That ambivalence was around. Yes, so much so that when she went back to Bethulia, she had to vouch for her purity. She said, you know, as God is my witness or something I'm paraphrasing, it is only my beauty, my face that delighted him and nothing else. I committed no sin.

So indeed, she declares herself to be guileless. There were other stories in classical literature, and in the Bible, intertwined with hers. Which one would you choose? There's plenty Deloila and so on. Salome seems near, but she didn't, because she didn't do the killing, did she? Exactly. Even though iconographically, they're often confused. You know, there are all these paintings, and, you know, one can only tell whether there's Judith or Salome,

depending on what they're holding. Is it a sort? Okay, that's Judith. Is it a platter? Okay, that must be Salome. So it's an interesting, and that's what Klim does, and we'll get to that later, I imagine. but I don't imagine there's anything quite like Judas murder. And she stands up.

I mean, the entire book is a didactic text. It's meant to inspire purity, piety and devotion. It's historical accurate, which is highly doubtful. That's another matter. So you think it's highly doubtful that she's historically accurate, but it has a propaganda purpose? Yes, I would probably say that, yes. Well, you've just said it?

Yes. John Gash, we're mainly going to be discussing paintings, but let's start with a statue, the Donatello statue. And can you tell this as what that is and how significant it was in the story of the representation of Judith? Yes, I think it's fairly significant. One of the striking things about this bronze statue that was originally gilded,

but it's lost a lot of its guilt now, except there's a bit left on the sword, was placed in the gardens of the Medici, the new Medici Palace, Medici Ricardi, sorry, in the middle of the 15th century. And they already had a statue of Donatello's David there. A little bit later, they put both statues outside the palace, I think as symbols of their wish to a statue,

the parallel between these biblical stories and the power of a small state, Florence, that wanted to assert itself against bigger enemies. So this, can you just tell this as what the position was. Medici then was a small state. They did have bigger enemies, and they were using this to reinforce their own position. I think that's certainly the case. But ironically, what happened is that when the Medici got kicked out in 1494 by Sabanarola and a republic rather than a plutocracy was instituted.

The new republican government put the statue of Judas outside the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and used it as a symbol, an anti-Medici symbol. The Medici were in Rome, just as 10 years later they would put Michelangelo's David outside to challenge and prevent the return of the Medici, you see. So on the one hand, they symbolise Florence's wish to survive against bigger enemies, is like France or the papacy. But on another, then it sort of switches function, which is quite interesting.

It is. What do you think do you think it had? Do you think citizens of Florence went past and said, ah, that's us against them, like David against Goliath, like Judith against Holofernes, Ponnese? I think it might well have done. And I think originally, when they commissioned the Judith, it's one of Donne Taylor's last sculptures,

I think they probably thought that they wanted to warn their enemies from within the Florentine oligarchy not to try anything against them. So, you know, the Patsy conspiracy occurs about 20 years after that's made, and they sort of defeat that and string them up. So my feeling is that the warning can be multivalent, and it certainly in some sense relates to the original story of this small Jewish state that is fighting against an army of 132,000 apparently, that's come from Nebuchadnezzar.

It's a wonderfully sophisticated form of propaganda, though, isn't it? We'll have a statue by Donatello and Annamar, MacLangelo, and that will see them off. I think so, but there may be private agendas too. The artist always has to be taken into account. I mean, his Judith is not that seductive, which she, of course, she takes, as we heard earlier, from Susan Witt, she takes off her widow's wee.

and sackcloth and ashes and puts on very seductive outfit. As far as one can tell, it's not very seductive anyway. She's got quite a nice Grecian nose. Sorry, yes, can I just ask one more question before? Did this story change when it moved to Northern Europe? Yes, I think there's a tendency in the 16th century, which is when it mainly moves to Northern Europe, for the artists in the courts there in places like Saxony

and in Flanders to paint these sort of rather erotic versions which sort of maybe have to do more with the fact that they're further away from the centre of Christian power and they feel they can make more sort of satirical comments and so Judith is then used as an excuse maybe to paint a new there's one by Hans Baldum Green who's famous for his eaves he just does these sexy pictures so in fact it's often an excuse

Well, let's choose another subject. How far did Judith actually go with Holofernes? A question you raised earlier. Well, it's in the book. Well, in the book, it claims that she didn't. Well, in the book, it says she delighted after she was delighted. Oh, the delight. Yes, no, you refer to that. Well, no, I think, as Ella said, that refers to her face and her beauty.

It talks all the time about the beauty of her face which enthralls the guards and everyone. Let's leave it at that. Yes, okay. I withdraw any sense of ambivalence. Well, no, but the artists like to show the ambivalence. I mean, there's a marvellous picture by Ian Sanders Van Hemsen, a Flemish artist from about 1540 in the Chicago Art Institute, which shows a completely naked Judith,

wielding her sword in one hand, and holding the bag into which she's going to put the head rather like a scrotum in her other hand. And we see her breasts and her backside altogether. And clearly this was an attempt at a piece of erotica. You wanted to come in. I only wanted to comment about Donatello's sculpture. John was saying that she wasn't overtly attractive in that.

And indeed, I think she wears a Marian garb, and that's another female character, that another virtuous woman that Judith would have been associated, Mary the Virgin. Exactly, the Mother of Christ. And I think she's very married and Donatello's. And of course, in those days, Judith was the second most popular name for a girl after Mary.

It was associated with the Virgin. She was thought of as a type from the Old Testament of Mary in the Newtist. Shakespeare himself called his daughters Judith and Susanna. Susan, Susan Poister, can we turn to Caravaggio, who painted her several times? And there's a painting in 1600 where the whole thing becomes much darker, more gory, more vivid, more of a piece of erotic butchery than you tell me about it. When you tell them about your, this is the fun now.

How can you describe these paintings on radio? This is like a wide screen painting, actually. It's very large and it's horizontal in format and it's very dark in its background. And that's one of the things, of course, that Caravaggio is so well known for, his paintings that offer these extreme contrasts of light and darkness. So you must be in a very dark tent in Holofer.

and he's tent in Caravaggio's representation. And you've got three brightly lit figures. So two on the right, and that's Judith and her maid. And then on the left, you've got the figure of Holofernes in his agony of death. So the painting's exactly divided into these two halves. And then there's a contrast between Judith, who's blonde and in a white top and looks quite young and almost frail, obviously meant to be very attractive, and her very ancient-looking maid,

who's looking directly at Holofernes, perhaps in shock, and she's holding the bag ready to put the head in. And Judith herself, as in the Bible, is holding Holofernes' head by his hair, and then slicing through his neck. And then the figure of Holofernes lying on the bed is almost unbearable to look at,

because he's so much alive. because he's looking up with open eyes and he absolutely knows what is happening to him as his head is being literally sliced off with a lot of blood by Judith. And the blood spurting out towards the bureaus? The blood spurting out towards us as we look in the darkness of this tent.

And he seems to be struggling. He's painted as a very, very strong man. He's very muscled. And actually Judith looks quite weak. come in in the Bible. She does take two goes to slice off his head and she looks as though she needs them here. But he looks as though he's sort of

trying to raise himself up on the bed and stop this, but he can't. It's really really horrific. What effect did this have, this gory attack on this man by this woman? When it was first shown?

I think Caravaggio was trying to impress with his painting skills and trying to make a name for himself by depicting horror in such a graphic way. It is like a horror film playing out before your eyes.

Ella, do you think there are any biographical details and not painting by Caravaggio? Yes, I actually do. It is a self-portrait, I believe. He does actually place himself in

the painting as Holofernes. And I must confess, I don't find the painting particularly convincing. It is almost like the dress rehearsal in a play. This Judith could not possibly be decapitating Holofernes in that. She really holds the sword at arm's length. She's not particularly strong, as Susan was saying. Not a drop of blood is on her.

And it just seems to me that Caravaggio as Holofernes is really trying to pull the dramatic ethos of the narrative. onto himself and outplay it. He's outplaying it in order to convince. And I'm not convinced by outplaying. To create that sense of gauriness and pain because Judith is not convinced. You don't think she's a convincing slaughterer.

Not this one. This Judith is not convincing to me. And I think he modelled this Judith on Berticichichich, this young girl who had been accused and indeed found guilty of Patricie side and decapitated just a few years before. And I think for him, Caravaggio is actually stating himself his own position towards

a bear treacher and saying she was innocent. She was right in killing her father because the father had actually been proved to be rather forceful and cruel father, et cetera, et cetera. So I think there's an element of autobiography there. Do you go along with that, John? It's an interesting hypothesis I don't really know. because I don't think that the figure of Holofernes' face looks at all like Caravaggio that we know from more certain portraits.

Also, he's a very muscular figure. I get the impression that Caravaggio just fancied painting this very muscular man. Judith could be inspired by, I agree entirely, could be inspired by the execution of Bertric Chechenchi, who was accused also of incest with her father as well as murdering him. But this was just a political vendetta on the part of Pope Clement the age. Also, I would say that Judith here is not a prostitute, Philly de Melandroni that recent research suggests that Caravaggio was involved in the circle with her.

I don't think it looks like her because it doesn't look enough. You mean the model for her? The model, I beg a part, yes. Not Judith herself. What do you think he was trying to convey about Judith herself? This is a time when powerful, as I understand it, from reading what you through it, at the time when powerful women began to be portrayed in paintings and so on. Yes, well, I think whether he's as feminist as some people are, I don't know, but he might be a bit.

I think if you notice her blouse actually is semi-transparent, and you can see her breasts and her body underneath. So I think he's trying to convey that side of her mission, the fact that she needs to be somewhat seductive, even if she didn't succumb as those northern painters tried to show. to Holofernes completely. So I think that's what he's trying to do. He's quite good at characterising things. But of course, he's introduced something that doesn't occur in the narrative

in the book of Judith, which is that he has the servant, who in the original text has no name, but then in later translations, gets called Abra. He brings her into the picture and the killing, whereas she's actually been sent outside the tent. And Judith only takes the head out and gives it to her.

And then, of course, Artemisi Gentileski follows that as well. Yes, and has Susan, Artemisi Gentilesky has the servant holding down the victim while the sword falls much more effectively, maybe. You tell us about Gentilesky and what she did in her version. Well, in her version of the painting, the maid is right there beside her, holding down Holofernes. It's taking two, really. to actually consummate this execution of Holofernes and an immense amount of blood is being shed as well in the version, particularly the one in the Uffizi,

where they are working together. There's an immense amount of blood spurting out and it's right in front of you. And they both seem to be exerting an awful lot of effort. I mean, we were just, I think, saying that in the Caravaggio, I mean, Judith does look as though she's having difficulty. whereas in Artemisia Gentileski's painting, a huge amount of effort is going into cutting off this head

and it looks as though it's going to be very successful. Do we say her being influenced by Caravaggio? I think she must have been strongly influenced by Caravaggio, though I think you can debate whether or not she would actually have seen the Caravaggio painting that we were talking about, whether that would actually have been visible to her. She must have known his work,

and certainly her father who trained her knew his work. But she herself seems to have had intense interest in this subject, and she was very unusual being a woman who achieved real fame, real success as a painter, brought up in a painter's studio, her father, and so on. There was a suggestion, there is a suggestion, that her own personal history was involved in the way she represented this. Well, I think this is one of the great debates about Artemisa Gentileski, who was extraordinarily successful as an artist in her own right. She was the first female painter to join the Florentine Academy in the early 17th century.

She was patronised by the Medici. She consorted with intellectuals in Florence. She had a long and very successful career as a woman painter. So the question arises as to what one knows of her biography. how that might or might not actually impinge on her painting, and particularly on her versions of paintings of this subject, Judith Killing Holofernes, when it's known that when she was 17,

she was raped by the painter Agostini Tassi, who was working with her father, and then there is a very well-documented trial, during which she says that after the rape she stabbed him. So people have made a connection between her representations of the subject of Judith because of what we know of her biography. But whether or not she chose to portray that subject because of her own biography, I think is a debatable point.

Can we continue that, Ella, because she says she stabbed him, but there's also a version that says she admitted in court that she continued to have, let's call it, sexual relations with him after this rape. Yes, and I think he was because she believed that Tassi would marry her, and she accepted that element of deflowering on that promise, on the basis of that promise. And of course, you know, he had a tenorous past already. There were allegations that he had, in fact, had his first wife killed. And the trial was not only for Artemisa's deflowering,

and this trial was actually brought by her father, Oratio, but also he accused Tassi of stealing some. of his paintings. So he wasn't necessarily a very pleasant character, but I think Artemisia, very young, very impressionable, possibly very impressed by his talent as an intellectual woman. I think she really believed him. She painted several versions of Judith. Did they differ in any significant way? And did they, were she trying to say different things in these different paintings? I believe they do differ. I believe that it shows Artemisia's changing her mind. about who Judith was.

And Susan was saying it's entirely speculative as to whether her tomb most gory, most explicit paintings of the murder itself are a bit of a fantasy, a revenge fantasy in her mind on Tassie. She herself suffered pain because during the trial, she submitted herself to trial by thumbscrews and all the rest of it, but she maintained until the end that she had been raped.

But the first two... You rushed that. They put some screws on it to get the truth out of it. And the truth they got what, or the so-called truth was what? That she had been raped. But Tassi never admitted to it. He denied it until the end.

He was given a sentence, very lenient sentence, which damaged Artemisa's reputation quite a bit. That's where she left and went to Florence. Is there any traction? John Gash, in comparing the gentle issue with the Carabagos in the terms of, you know, man-woman? In terms of man-woman, possibly yes, because of what we've said earlier about Artemisia's experience of the rape and the rape trial, which obviously was a rape, even if she did continue

to have a sexual relationship with Tassi for a year or so afterwards. The fact that we have two young women in the two versions by Artemisian. of the actual beheading. She did five pictures overall, but the other three are post-beheading. It may be suggests her feelings which have been very much discussed, and I think rather well discussed,

by Mary Garard in her book on Artemisi Gentileski, that this was a kind of early feminist sort of thing, a sense of sisterhood. The two women need to combine together to overcome the tyrant Holofernes. And they do it with great. relish. I mean, it seems to be more realistic. We said earlier that perhaps Caravaggio's one doesn't look so realistic, but my response to that would be to say, well, she's just asked for

God's help, help me this day, Lord God of Israel, before she does the two cuts. So in fact, it's a kind of supernatural thing as well as a physical thing, although Caravaggio is very much an artist anchored in the physical and observation directly of models. So you've got that difference and you've got a younger woman whereas Caravaggio, as we heard earlier from yourself and others, had this old, wrinkled old lady.

And I think he just, that's in the tradition of Venice, really, in Titian's paintings where they like to have a contrast between an old and a young figure. But of course, none of them should be in the room. They're just put there, I think, because you have to compress,

it's a difficult thing for a narrative painter, history painter, you have to compress a long story into one scene and that's the reason for that. But she's spending at a time when the interest in Judith was still strong and Judith as a real person in Verdecomas in the Bible was completely accepted. I think it was accepted and as we heard earlier from Ella

that she was thought of as a precursor and a type and a parallel of the Virgin Mary and also maybe they were trying to encourage this sense of a strong woman. I think the church was never sort of totally misogynistic. Some individual churchmen might have been trying to encourage the sense of a strong woman. There were various rulers at the time who were regent tesses like in France, married a meggi, later out of Austria.

And some of the pictures of these strong women, virtuous women from the Bible in antiquity, I think were commissioned to reinforce that sense of the potential role of women as equals and leaders. But of course, the opposite side of that, the reverse side of the kind, is that the misogyny often continued and women were thought of as being deceitful and devious and etc. Do we see that, Susan Feister,

in the work by Johann Lise in the National Gallery, and the way he responds to Judith? Well, Liz, who was a painter from Germany, who came to work in Italy, like a number of northern painters at this time, certainly shows Judith as a strong woman. It's a very extraordinary composition in which we are really right in the tent,

right up next to the headless body of Holofernes and Judith, who has her back to us, and her back is partly uncovered, and it's a broad, quite muscular back. So it is as though Lys is showing us Judith as a very, very strong woman who has just beheaded Holofernes, and we can just see over her shoulder

the head of Holofernes, or at least one eye of his head, and one eye of her maid, who is obviously putting the head in the sack, being in the tent in this slightly unhistorical, unbiblical way, but as you said, it compresses the narrative. But the extraordinary thing is you get this huge back,

but you also get her head turning to look at us in this very defiant way, saying, yes, I've done it, I've triumphed, I've carried out this deed for God. It's a very powerful depiction. Ella, Eleanor To Hul, do we have other examples of women painters tackling this subject? Which are the most, can you give us a couple of the most significant? Yes, well, apart from Artemisia, there's Lavigneur Fontana, who was actually painting before Artemisia, and after that Elizabeth Serrani, there are two versions of the Fontana, one both in Bologna, from around the 1600 as well. And in them, Judith again is actually portrayed as virtuous very much performing this deed, this horrible act on behalf of God.

In one of them, she's looking up towards the heavens and presents the head of Holofernes on a table covered in a black, with a black cloth, almost like an altar. And she lifts her eyes to heaven. There's this beautiful light coming on her face, almost God's approval. And again, it's a wonderful moment in which, you know, Hadid is very much portrayed as, you know, being part of a godly deed, in other words. But going back to Artemisia, her other portrayals post the killing are very interesting. going back to her own attitude towards Judith.

There's one in Palazzo Pitti in Florence where she's actually caught with her servant in a moment of perhaps fright. They're both looking back. We see the back of the servant, but we can actually look at Judith. And that element of vulnerability is taken further by the fact that Judith is resting the sword against her own neck

on this beautiful skin, you know, very, very clear, wonderful skin, and it's all exposed, and that the metal of the sword being so close to her own neck creates that element of vulnerability. And that's why the pommel of the sword actually perhaps invokes the Medusa, the Gorgon, in terms of that power and all of that. And, of course, the other one from 1625, which is now in Detroit, that is the most beautiful one, quite often assigned as her masterpiece.

And in it, they're in the tent. the servant is actually in the process of putting the decapitated head in the bag. Judith is standing up in this beautiful cold dress and she's still holds the sword with her right hand, but her left is going up against the flame from a candle. And it is that that I actually find is very telling because her hand is beautifully clean, spotless. It's a godly deed. However, that very hand is casting a shadow on her face. And I think in that Artemisia, perhaps it's reading too far, but this is how I like to read it.

Artemisia showing that she accepts that even though it's a godly deed, it does cost Judith because it's a killing and itself. John Gash, is there any sense in which people were attracted to this because of the erotic possibilities in this event? I think very much so. John Ruskin, writing in his mornings in Florence in the 1870s, said that there were millions of these horrific pictures which he disliked. them ghastly, but that in fact these didn't follow the story as it actually was. And he thought that artists actually represented this subject because it combined the thrill of an execution and a beautiful woman with the additional attraction of some previously committed sin, i.e. that she'd succumb to Holofernes to a certain extent anyway.

So Ruskin was drawing attention to that sensationalist aspect of many of these stories. I think so, because if you think of the Caravaggio and a new version of the Caravaggio that I think is by him, but other people don't, that has emerged from an attic somewhere in Toulouse, and the Artemisia pictures, they're very much parallel to the Elizabethan and Jacobian theatre in a way, Well, you know, with the blood and thunder and the drama, the nocturnal setting for dark deeds. Webster, for instance, the white devil. So I think Ruskin had a good point there,

although he slightly over-egged the pudding in the way he described it, I think. Susan, we've just mentioned, fleetingly mentioned the servant. Well, sir, have we been fleeting because the servant is inconsistent in the paintings? She's not in the story, but inconsistent in the paintings. Well, for example, if you go back to the 15th century and you look at Botticelli's representation of Judith walking back to Bithulia

with her maid and she's got the head, the difference between them is in the way that they're dressed and in their head coverings. And very often the maid, even if she's quite a young woman, has a covered head, whereas Judith is wearing these rather splendid clothes jewels that she put on. But you who read so much into these paintings, what do you make of that? I think it goes with the representation in which both women are there in order to overcome

Holofernes that in other narratives that the maid is just there with the bag ready to put their head in. But in Artemisia's paintings, it takes two women to subdue him. And you mentioned Klimt near the start of the programme. Would you like to tell us about the way Klimt took this on? Well, Klimt depicts Judith alone, so no servant, that's for sure. And in fact, going back to that element of the servant, the presence of the servant could be in the painting to destabilise that element of guilt.

So having the servant present in the tent ensures the message that Judith has pure and she hasn't actually engaged in any hanky-panky with Holofernes. So, you know, because the servant... But she has murdered somebody. She has murdered, but not there. So it's a different kind of sin rather than a sexual sin. So Klimt, speaking of sin, definitely associates Judith with sin and death. His works emerge from the context of increased literacy in regards to Freud's psychoanical theory.

Freud uses Judith as an example of female, not hysteria, frigidity. Fragidity, which is interesting, hence her prolonged widowed status, she refuses all these marriage proposals. And of course, Leopold Zahamasoch declared Judith has his muse for his sadomasochistic sexology texts. So Judith emerges as the sadomasochistic ideal. So in Judith's first painting, which was actually exhibited as Salome whilst Klimt was still alive. So the curator of that exhibition thought, oh my gosh, Klimt must have got his myths wrong. This can't be chased Judith. It must be

Salome because she's depicted in this poscoital moment of pleasure. She's holding the decapitated head of Holofurn is close to her womb. There's one breast fully exposed and the other half exposed and she's she her mouth is half open um it's really quite a sensual uh painting and yet uh they they exhibited a salome whilst the frame had very clearly the title embossed at the top judith judith and holofernes which is an extraordinary thing to have done don't you think and and the second one is also which is now in venice is as another um a depiction of um that is quite often um exhibited as Salome 2, or Judith 2 or Salome, because again, nobody can make up their mind. But she's actually in profile walking with the head in her left hand.

Her hands are very claw-like, which is very interesting. So she's very denatured this woman, and she's swinging the decarputated head by the hair, which is quite disturbing. And in the first one, Judith includes Assyrian fruit trees behind her, but also lots of either two. tombstones or scales. So the association to death and sin, the serpent, is very clear for Klimt. And of course, again, talking about his context, that element of misogyny and anti-Semitic sentiment is very clear and Klimt. You know, there are all these texts admiring Jewish women and in the same sentence wishing upon them some terrible fate, which is an interesting point.

But the story finally, John, John, actually, the story faded. The interest in Judith faded. Why do you think that was? Salome keeps going, as we were. Salome keeps going in the noughty 90s, yes, with Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, etc. Well, why did it fade? Well, my own view is because it was no longer such a good vehicle for the church and for other political propagandists to pursue it.

and maybe also people in the 19th century and early 20th century were less excited by this sort of baroque exaggeration and they wanted to get away from that excessive sort of cruelty that the earlier pictures of Caravaggio and Co seem to convey. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, John Gash. Anna Newton Hall and Susan Foister next week, pheromones, the invisible chemical signals that many animal species send each other to attract, to show the way to food, and to dominate. Thank you very much for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I think we didn't really talk about those sort of dual traditions that arose in the Middle Ages, the sort of religious and the secular, and particularly that tradition of the power of women, where you're sort of inverting the way in which women are expected to behave in society through a whole series of stories of different people, men and women. And Judith can pop up in that context as well. Yes, I agree with Susan there. It's interesting because whilst, on the one hand, she's the virtuous woman,

the Weibermacht, the power of the women, is actually arising, you know, culturally, and the north of Europe. And so you have Hans Baldwin Green depicting Aristotle and Phyllis with Phyllis seated nude on top of Aristotle and then Judith suffers the same fate. You have Bautobam with Judith seated nude on top of decapitated head of Holofernes.

It's really quite obscure, macabre. The idea is that women do use their bodies to subjugate the most intellectual and the strongest of men, which is an interesting... So those stories had quite... a wide circulation in prints and in different kinds of representation in the Renaissance. Absolutely, yes, I think it goes back, what the French called the Kareles de Femme, the arguments about women about their nature, whether they were virtuous or whether they

weren't virtuous. And artists obviously like to lard in from their own perspective, different aspects of this. And the non-virtuous aspect is maybe there in a picture of about 1613, of which there's a copy of about 1620 by the Florentine artist, Christophano Alori, which

shows Judith holding the head of Holofernes with the maid servant in the background. The maid servant this time isn't an old crone. Philippo Baldinucci, who was a biographer of Alori, says that in fact this was a portrait of his

a Valori's girlfriend with her mother and that the woman led him a song and dance and it was a very unhappy marriage and then the poet Jan Battista Marino looking at one version of this picture made the kind of emblematic commentary that was not uncommon at that time

he said that it makes almost Holofernes into a hero, a tragic hero that he was doubly wounded first by Cupid's arrow because he falls for Judith and then by Judith Sword. And I think it's that sort of documented biographical illusion that perhaps allows people to push the idea that Artemisia Gentilesky is actually expounding her biography in the paintings of Judith and Holofernes.

And they often self-portraits, you know, auto-depictions of her. And she paints so many strong women. She paints Esther, she paints Yale, she paints the magnanim, and they're all in this beautiful golden dress, as well as Lucretia and Cleopatra. So she's really, and Susanna, she really does go for the strong women. But it's that virtuosity that she wants to maintain because Bethulia, the Israelite city,

there's a play on words because in Hebrew Bethulah means virgin. So Judith becomes the personification of Bethulia, the personification of the virgin, as a prototype of Mary before Mary. So as long as they virgin, that's fine. There seems to be a trade-off. They're allowed their femininity as long as they don't use it

on that as power. Which is interesting. It's also finally, for me, an interesting parallel in that in the book of Judith, Judith says that Holofernes has been defeated by the hand of woman. And Artemisia later writes to one of her patrons, Don Antonio Rufus, saying, I will show you what a woman can do. So one has this feeling of some kind of inspiration emerging from that text,

the book of Judith, for Artemisia in her life and her art, her artist. And yet in the text, you get the feeling that Judith is used by God. Judith is used by God to shame further his enemies, you know, so it's by the hand of a woman, meaning God is actually so much stronger because even though one of my women can defeat the worst of your generals, as it were. And Judith is there to protect the horns of God's altar, the text puts it. So it's God's own power and phallic power for that reason. So it's an interesting thing. Everything she's doing, I mean, she says she is doing through the power of God. She is carrying out the will of God. And I mean, you talked earlier about her sin, but I mean, I think in the Bible, killing Holofernes isn't a sin. It's what saves

the Israelites. It's what saves Jerusalem. And that's what enables her to be compared to the Virgin Mary. She's not just pure and chase, but she's carried out God's will. And she's enabled a future for Israel. Sorry. I was just saying that in that Detroit painting by Artemisia, that shadow that her clean hand casts on her face, I think even though the deed is just and the deed is godly, I think Artemisia is saying it does leave a mark. It will affect anyone to engage in such a bloody act. and I think that it's quite gruesome, it's very violent. So finally, producers are about to burst in, but can we go back to our beginning? Just one second.

Do you really, do you think that, how much truth do you think there is in that story? In the story of Judith. The whole story, Judith. The whole story of Judith. Was there a general call Holofernes? I don't think there's any historical evidence to support any of it that we know of. In that case, you did remarkably well.

Thank you very much. Does anyone want to your coffee? Yes, please. Coffee? Coffee? Coffee? Coffee would be fantastic. Tea? Coffee for me. Coffee? Tea, please. I have tea, please.

In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Gemmokane and I want to tell you about Don't You Forget About Me, a brand new hub for great music documentaries from BBC Radio 4. Whatever your musical tastes, we've got you covered, whether you want to discover the cult of Apex Twin, or appreciate the genius of Jeff Buckley. My whole philosophy and my whole discovery

is that every emotion has a sound to it. Listen to old favourites and make new musical discoveries. I don't have the answers and you shouldn't either. And I'm going to make it really complicated just to prove that. Just search for Don't You Forget About Me in BBC Sounds and subscribe now.