Artwork story
About Judith, looking towards the right, seated nude atop the dead body of Holofernes, with a sword in her right hand and the head of Holofernes in her left hand
The artist and artwork
Barthel Beham engraved this Judith and Holofernes in 1525 on a sheet barely two inches high. The Nuremberg artist and his brother Sebald are counted among the Little Masters, printmakers known for fitting precise figures into exceptionally small copperplates. Beham absorbed Albrecht Dürer's example and Italian sources by Raphael and Marcantonio Raimondi through circulating engravings. His Judith has the weight and modeled anatomy of a much larger image, but it is compressed into an object that could be held close and examined privately.
The world around it
The date 1525 ties the plate to a moment of personal and political upheaval. That year Nuremberg expelled Barthel, Sebald, and Georg Pencz for heretical and antiauthoritarian beliefs influenced by radical reformers. Across the German lands, the Reformation was challenging church authority while images and arguments traveled rapidly in print. Barthel later moved to Munich and served Duke Wilhelm IV, shifting from an imperial city's contested religious culture to a Catholic court. Judith, a vulnerable community's defender who overturns military power, would have carried unusual force in that unstable world, even without functioning as a direct political allegory.
A detail to notice
The biblical Judith saves her city by entering the camp of the Assyrian general Holofernes and beheading him with his own sword. Beham avoids the moment of attack and shows its controlled aftermath. Judith sits nude across the general's foreshortened corpse, raises the sword vertically at left, and grips his severed head by the hair at lower right. Her face turns away from both trophies, so the composition feels alert rather than triumphant. The blade, her torso, and the hanging head form three strong verticals against the body's diagonal. Even the engraved date “1525” is isolated in the upper-left corner like a terse witness to the scene.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is print made in Engraving and held in the Drawings and Prints department.
Recorded dimensions include Sheet: 2 1/8 x 1 7/16 in. (5.4 x 3.7 cm).
Subject terms include Swords, Holofernes, Judith, and Death. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Bequest of Phyllis Massar, 2011.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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