Judith beheading Holofernes
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
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
-
Hildegard of Bingen
26 Jun, 2014 780 Music -
Boudica
11 Mar, 2010 900 History -
Melisende, Queen of Jerusalem
21 Nov, 2019 900 History -
Margaret of Anjou
24 May, 2018 940 History of Europe -
Christine de Pizan
8 Jun, 2017 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology -
Julian of Norwich
19 Oct, 2023 270 History of Christianity -
St Hilda
5 Apr, 2007 270 History of Christianity -
The Artist
28 Mar, 2002 700 Arts -
Paganism in the Renaissance
16 Jun, 2005 940 History of Europe -
The Sistine Chapel
31 Mar, 2022 700 Arts -
Picasso’s Guernica
2 Nov, 2017 700 Arts -
Berthe Morisot
13 Oct, 2022 750 Painting -
The Siege of Orléans
24 May, 2007 940 History of Europe -
Mary Magdalene
25 Feb, 2016 270 History of Christianity -
The Siege of Munster
5 Nov, 2009 270 History of Christianity -
The Bacchae
18 Mar, 2021 880 Classical and modern Greek literatures -
Judas Maccabeus
24 Nov, 2011 930 History of the Ancient World -
Albrecht Dürer
12 Nov, 2020 700 Arts -
Queen Zenobia
30 May, 2013 930 History of the Ancient World -
Macbeth
1 Oct, 2020 820 English and Old English literatures
Programme ID: m0002hl7
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002hl7
Auto-category: 709 (History of art)