Judith beheading Holofernes

14 Feb, 2019 700 Arts

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, 1555

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Susan Foister 4 episodes
    Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at the National Gallery
  • John Gash No other episodes
    Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Aberdeen
  • Ela Nutu Hall No other episodes
    Research Associate at the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, at the University of Sheffield

Reading list

  • The New English Bible with the Apocrypha
    Oxford University Press ( 1970) Google Books →
  • Women, Seduction and Betrayal in Biblical Narrative
    Alice Bach (Cambridge University Press, 1997) Google Books →
  • The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and Other Thinking People
    Mieke Bal (ed.) (University of Chicago Press, 2005) Google Books →
  • Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art: Critical Reading and Catalogue Raisonne
    R. Ward Bissell (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999) Google Books →
  • On Famous Women
    Giovanni Boccaccio (trans. Guido Guarino) (Italica Press, 2011) Google Books →
  • Cranach: Exhibition catalogue
    Bodo Brinkmann (Royal Academy, 2008) Google Books →
  • Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi
    Keith Christiansen and Judith Mann (eds.) (Yale University Press, 2001) Google Books →
  • Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art
    Mary D. Garrard (Princeton University Press, 1989) Google Books →
  • The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work
    Germaine Greer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979) Google Books →
  • Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art
    James Hall (John Murray, 1989) Google Books →
  • Caravaggio
    Howard Hibbard (Icon, 1983) Google Books →
  • Artemisia: The Story of a Battle for Greatness
    Alexandra Lapierre (trans. Liz Heron) (Vintage, 2001) Google Books →
  • Renaissance Florence: the Art of the 1470s
    Patricia Lee Rubin and Alison Wright (National Gallery, 1999) Google Books →
  • Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and Her Patrons in Sixteenth-century Bologna
    Caroline P. Murphy (Yale University Press, 2003) Google Books →
  • Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology
    Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (eds.) (Pandora, 1981) Google Books →
  • Visions and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art
    Griselda Pollock (Routledge, 1988) Google Books →
  • Judith, Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture
    Margarita Stocker (Yale University Press, 1998) Google Books →
  • Violence and Virtue: Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes
    Eve Straussman-Pflanzer (Yale University Press, 2013) Google Books →
  • Women Artists: 1550-1950
    Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976) Google Books →
  • The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
    Giorgio Vasari (trans. Gaston du Vere) (Knopf, 1996) Google Books →
  • Caravaggio: The Complete Works
    Rossella Vodret (Silvana, 2010) Google Books →

Related episodes

Programme ID: m0002hl7

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002hl7

Auto-category: 709 (History of art)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello, Judith was once one of the most famous women in the Old Testament.