Judith, My Murdering Mistress and Her Mother

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Judith, My Murdering Mistress and Her Mother
by Cristoforo Allori (Italy, 1577-1621)
Judith the upper class widow is draped in magnificent tapestries, yet she has found the inner strength to kill and to display the head of her people's would-be destroyer. This might be a viewer's first reading of the picture. However, art historians add that Allori had a personal grudge to bear in this portrait. Instead of an embodiment of all Christian virtues, Judith, the heroine-cum-femme fatale, has been chosen to express his ambivalence toward an entrancingly beautiful yet cold, cruel woman. Judith is portrayed with the face and figure of Allori's mistress who has just abandoned him — figuratively slain him. The severed head of the love-struck Holofernes is a self-portrait of the artist himself. The accomplice of this remorseless betrayal is the maid, bearing the face of the mistress' own mother. Judith's beauty explains to all the fatal attraction of this heartless, homicidal heroine. (based on Margarita Stocker, Judith: The Sexual Warrior, p. 27)