Art, literature & history
Judith
1525
- Dating
- Exact year
- Held at
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Medium
- Engraving in black on ivory laid paper
- Dimensions
- Image/plate/sheet: 5.4 × 3.6 cm (2 3/16 × 1 7/16 in.)
- Collection no.
- 1920.1203
- Attribution
- By the artist
- Image rights
- CC0 1.0License details
Barthel Beham. Judith. Barthel Beham; Art Institute of Chicago; Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer. CC0 1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/). Full-frame proportional resize and JPEG compression.
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
About this artwork
Judith — Barthel Beham. 1525.
Medium: Engraving in black on ivory laid paper. Dimensions: Image/plate/sheet: 5.4 × 3.6 cm (2 3/16 × 1 7/16 in.).
Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.
The stalwart heroine of the Book of Judith from the Hebrew Apocrypha, the beautiful widow Judith seduced and beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes, whose forces had besieged her city, in order to save her people. Depicted here in the nude, she sits triumphantly on Holofernes’s corpse, with a firm grip on her sword and the disembodied head. Judith was the rare female leader to be celebrated as such during this period.
Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.
Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.
Location checked Sep 10, 2026. This does not indicate whether the work is on display.