Judith

CC0 Public Domain Designation

c. 1540

Jan Sanders van Hemessen (Netherlandish, active c. 1519–1556)

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.

Status: On View, Gallery 207
Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist: Jan Sanders van Hemessen
Title: Judith
Place: Netherlands (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1535–1545
Medium: Oil on panel
Dimensions: 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.)
Credit Line: Wirt D. Walker Fund
Reference Number: 1956.1109
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/4575/manifest.json

Robert Lebel, “Une ‘Judith’ de Jan van Hemessen,” Journal de l’amateur d’art 10, 101 (1956), p. 3 (ill.).
Hans Huth, “A Mannerist Judith for the Art Institute,” AIC Quarterly 51, 1 (1957), pp. 2 (ill.), 3.
S.V., “Nuovi acquisti all’Art Institute,” Emporium 63 (1957), pp. 185–86 (ill.).
Helen Comstock, “A Flemish Mannerist Judith,” Connoisseur 140 (1957), p. 139 (ill.).
Art Institute of Chicago, Paintings in The Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Picture Collection (Chicago, 1961), pp. 214–15.
Giorgio T. Faggin, La pittura ad Anversa nel Cinquecento (Florence, 1968), pl. 111.
Gert von der Osten and Horst Vey, Painting and Sculpture in Germany and the Netherlands, 1500 to 1600 (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 198, pl. 183.
John Maxon, The Art Institute of Chicago (London, 1970), pp. 255 (ill.), 287.
Paul Wescher, “Jan van Hemessen und Jan van Amstel,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, n.s., 12 (1970), pp. 42–43, fig. 6.
Jan Bialostocki, “La gamba sinistra della Giuditta: Il quadro di Giorgione nella storia del tema,” in Giorgione e l’umanesimo veneziano, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Florence, 1981), pp. 216–17; trans. and repr. in Jan Bialostocki, The Message of Images: Studies in the History of Art (Vienna, 1988), pp. 126, 261.
Burr Wallen, Jan van Hemessen: An Antwerp Painter between Reform and Counter-Reform (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983), pp. 2, 107–08, 309–10, no. 36, fig. 121.
Peter C. Sutton, A Guide to Dutch Art in America (Washington, D.C., and Grand Rapids, Mich., 1986), p. 49, fig. 65.
Art Institute of Chicago, Master Paintings in The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, 1988), p. 21 (ill.).
Robert Genaille, review of Wallen, Jan van Hemessen: An Antwerp Painter between Reform and Counter-Reform, in Revue Belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art 58 (1989), p. 138.
Corinna Höper, Katalog der Gemälde des 14. bis 18. Jahrhunderts in der Kunsthalle Bremen (Bremen, 1990), pp. 167–68.
Guy Bauman and Walter A. Liedtke, Flemish Paintings in America: A Survey of Early Netherlandish and Flemish Paintings in the Public Collections of North America (Antwerp, 1992), p. 339, no. 264 (ill.).
Burr Wallen, “Jan Sanders van Hemessen,” in The Dictionary of Art, vol. 14 (New York, 1996), p. 380, fig. 1.
Margarita Stocker, Judith, Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture (New Haven, 1998), pp. 18, 112, fig. 13.
Andreas Kreul, Doppelgänger: Repliken und “andere Originale” zu Werken aus der Sammlung der Kunsthalle Bremen, exh. cat. (Kunsthalle Bremen, 1999), pp. 18–21, 29, 56 (ill.).
James Rondeau, ed., Paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago: Highlights of the collection (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2025), 28 (ill.).

Kansas City, MO, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Visiting Masterpiece: Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Judith, September 24, 2019-October 30, 2020.

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.

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

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