Judith
Jan Sanders van Hemessen
c. 1540
Judith was considered one of the most heroic women of the Old Testament. According to the biblical story, when her city was besieged by the Assyrian army, the beautiful young widow gained access to the quarters of the general Holofernes. After winning his confidence and getting him drunk, she took his sword and cut off his head, thereby saving the Jewish people. Although Judith was often shown richly and exotically clothed, Jan Sanders van Hemessen chose to present her as a monumental nude, aggressively brandishing her sword even after severing Holofernes’s head.Van Hemessen was one of the chief proponents of a style, popular in the Netherlands in the first half of the sixteenth century, that was deeply indebted to the monumental character of classical sculpture, as well as to the art of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Raphael. Judith’s muscular body and her elaborate, twisting pose reflect these influences. Yet the use of the aggressive nude figure here also suggests a certain ambivalence on the part of the artist and his audience toward the seductive wiles Judith may have employed to disarm Holofernes. In this work, Van Hemessen combined an idealized form with precisely rendered textures, as in the hair and beard of Holofernes and Judith’s gauzy headdress and brocaded bag. The interplay between the straining pose of the figure, the dramatic lighting, and the fastidiously recorded surfaces serves to heighten the tension of this composition.
| Title | Judith |
|---|---|
| Artist | Jan Sanders van Hemessen |
| Date | c. 1540 |
| Medium | Oil on panel |
| Style | 16th Century |
| Dimensions | 99.1 × 77.2 cm (39 × 30 3/8 in.); Framed: 119.7 × 97.8 × 6.4 cm (47 1/8 × 38 1/2 × 2 1/2 in.) |
About Jan Sanders van Hemessen
One of the most idiosyncratic artists working in Antwerp in the first half of the 16th century, Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s style reflects the influence of Rome on artists in this city during the 1520s. He, like other Northern artists who traveled to Rome to study the ruins of antiquity as well as the artistic wonders of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Raphael Sanzio, integrated the heroic and monumental forms of Michelangelo with the facial expressions of Raphael and realistic detail typical of Northern European art. By fusing these stylistic tendencies, he created compelling and moralizing genre scenes and portrayals of biblical subjects, often on a large scale.
The artist’s Judith, an arresting depiction of the biblical tale of Judith and Holofernes, illustrates his ability to dramatize familiar narratives using a variety of contemporary references. The nude heroine, starkly lit against a dark background, twists into the figura serpintinata pose beloved by the Italian Mannerists. Yet the muscular body of this sword-wielding maiden recalls Michelangelo’s powerful nudes. By placing her close to the picture plane, Van Hemessen focuses attention on her physical and moral fortitude in slaying the general Holofernes. The positioning of the general’s decapitated head near her hips is a bawdy touch more commonly seen in the artist’s genre scenes.
By imbuing his biblical subjects with an earthy realism, Van Hemessen infused a liveliness into historically distant narratives, a strategy that would impact Northern painters throughout the 16th century.