Judith and Holofernes

Judith is the widow of the Book of Judith who walked into the Assyrian camp, won the trust of the general Holofernes and cut off his head while he lay drunk, saving her besieged town. Cranach paints her as a young woman of a German court, in a feathered red beret and a patterned bodice, the sword in her right hand and her left gripping the hair of the head on a stone ledge. Her hair hangs long and loose, as unmarried girls then wore it. Around 1530 the story carried a political charge. Some historians, Werner Schade among them, have linked Cranach's Judiths to the league of Protestant princes formed in 1531 against the emperor Charles V, when killing a tyrant could be read as lawful resistance. The panel's own history points another way. By about 1610 it was in the Habsburg collection in Vienna, and there it was hung as a pair with a Salome probably painted around 1600, so that the two women were read together as a lesson in female cunning. On the sword blade is a small wolf, the mark of the bladesmiths of Passau.