Judith

Jan Sanders van Hemessen

Period

1500-1550

Theme

Portrait

Medium

Oil on panel

Current Location

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

The Story

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.

Working in Oil on panel at 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.), Jan Sanders van Hemessen constructs depth through value contrast rather than outline, letting figures emerge from darkness the way they would under candlelight or through a shuttered window.

Look closely and the painting opens up. Objects you might pass over — a folded letter, a half-drawn curtain, the angle of a glance — were placed to be read. Likeness was only part of the job; the painting also had to argue for the sitter's place in the world.

Housed at Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, the painting has passed through the hands of collectors, dealers, and institutions before reaching public view — a provenance that is itself part of the object's story.

“A silence so complete it becomes its own witness.”

From the museum

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, as in Holofernes’s hair and beard and Judith’s gauzy headdress and brocaded bag. The ﬁgure’s straining pose, the dramatic lighting, and the highly detailed surfaces all serve to heighten the tension of this composition.

Wirt D. Walker Fund

Materials & technique

Technique: oil painting, painting, painting techniques, panel painting, painting (image making).

Provenance

Marie Catherine d’Onyn de Chastre (née Baronne de Herckenrode) (1731–1824); sold, Douarière d’Onyn de Chastre (née Baronne de Herckenrode), Leuven, Belgium, June 10, 1825, lot 129, to Désiré van den Schrieck (1785–1857), Leuven, Belgium. With Robert Lebel, Paris, by 1956; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1956.