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Donatello's bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici rule in Florence - Bibliography
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2001 by Sarah Blake McHam
(23.) Judith's role as a paragon of Christian virtues such as chastity, temperance, justice, fortitude, wisdom, and humility was established in the early Middle Ages by the Psychomachia of Prudentius, the very influential Christian epic written in 405. This spurred a large number of literary and visual interpretations of the theme, and an equally extensive secondary literature in the modern period. For a brief synthesis of the Christian interpretations of Judith, see Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi; The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 282-89; and Frank Capozzi, "The Evolution and Transformation of the Judith and Holofernes Theme in Italian Drama and Art before 1627," Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1975, 3-22. For the additional connotations of situating a sculpture of this theme in a garden setting, see Matthew G. Looper, "Political Messages in the Medici Palace Garden," Journal of Garden History 12, no. 4 (1992): 255-68. For an explora tion of the popularity of the theme, see the recent study by Margarita Stocker, Judith: Sexual Warrior, Women and Power in Western Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
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(24.) The rim of roughly woven cloth, riding lower on her forehead than her veil, which has usually been discussed as an indication of Donatello's technique of casting from real cloth (see Bruno Bearzi, "Considerazioni di tecnica sul San Ludovico e la Giuditta di Donatello," Bollettino d'Arte 16 [1950]: 119-23), is relevant to the tale of Judith. It could hint at the sackcloth in which she and the other Jews of Bethulia dressed as they beseeched God to deliver them from Holofernes' siege of their town. It further indicates the modesty with which the widowed Judith typically dressed, disguised by the finery and jewels with which she covered herself to seduce Holofernes.
(25.) The three Bacchanalian reliefs on the statue's base reinforce this meaning; see Edgar Wind, "Donatello's Judith: A Symbol of 'Sanctimonia.'" Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 1 (1937): 62-63.
(26.) The medallion is described in Janson, 203.
(27.) Book of Judith, 13: 6-10, 16: 19-20 (as in n. 22), 153, 175-76: "And going to the bedpost which was at Holofernes's head, she took down from it his sword, and nearing the bed she seized hold of the hair of his head and said, 'Give me strength this day, Adonai God of Israel.' And with all her might she smote him twice in the neck and took his head from him. And she rolled his body from the couch and took the canopy from the poles.... Judith dedicated to God all Holofernes's possessions ... and the canopy which she had taken for herself from his bed, she presented to Adonai as a votive offering." Generally, this more dramatic rendition is not common until the 17th century, as in paintings by Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi; see Garrard (as in n. 23), 290-91, 307-36. A rare early example is Guariento's version for the chapel of the Carrara Palace in Padua, now in the Musei Civici, Padua (first cited by Herzner, 1980 [as in n. 5], 144-45).
