Judith and Holofernes

The Master of Marradi's Judith and Holofernes, painted around 1450 and now in the Dayton Art Institute, depicts one of the most dramatically charged subjects from the Hebrew Bible — the widow Judith who entered the camp of the Assyrian general Holofernes, seduced him, and decapitated him in his tent, saving her city of Bethulia. Judith was one of the most popular subjects in Italian Renaissance painting precisely because she combined themes that resonated powerfully in this culture: civic virtue, female heroism, tyrannicide, and the defeat of a military oppressor by a woman.

Tempera on panel. The composition focuses on Judith at the moment of decapitation or immediately after, holding the severed head of Holofernes — a subject that required balancing the triumphant civic meaning with the horrifying physical reality of the act.