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Judith
Jan Sanders van Hemessen (Netherlandish, active c. 1519–1556)
c. 1540
- Medium
- Oil on panel
- Classification
- Painting
- 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.)
- Culture
- Netherlands
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Wirt D. Walker Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions nudity. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Jan Sanders van Hemessen portrayed the Jewish heroine Judith as a muscular nude to be both admired and feared. When the Assyrian army threatened Judith’s people, the handsome widow saved them from slaughter by infiltrating the tent of the enemy general, Holofernes, to win his confidence and then behead him. Van Hemessen’s life-size interpretation reflects contemporary male ambivalence toward female agency. It celebrates Judith’s physical and moral strength but also foregrounds the sexuality that enabled her triumph, reproducing for viewers the aggressive beauty that caused her adversary’s demise. Judith was one of several religious and mythological figures featured in works hailing the power of women, a recurrent theme in northern Europe during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.
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 and Raphael. Judith’s muscular body and her elaborate, twisting pose reflect these influences. Van Hemessen combined an idealized form with precisely rendered textures,…
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
