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To be beautiful in the Western imagination is often to be gentle, supple, and fair. One wants to preserve the beautiful lily, to save the helpless lamb, to rescue the innocent maiden. Beauty, innocence, and purity are often tethered to one another. Violence, however, is thought to be the contrary of beauty. Violence does not nourish beauty but extinguishes it. But what happens when the beautiful and the violent converge? Might they, despite their often disjunctive relationship, serve each other? And what more happens when beauty and violence meet at the origins of our modern notions of race? We encounter this convergence in the Judith tradition. The relationship between beauty and violence becomes elastic; neither Judith’s beauty, purity, and innocence nor the violence she enacts on behalf of the Israelites extinguish each other. Rather, they nourish each other.
Some background on Judith and the subsequent literary and artistic traditions that sought to retell her story: In the book that bears her name, considered deuterocanonical by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches and as part of the Apocrypha by most Protestants, the Hebrew widow Judith uses her beauty to seduce an Assyrian general named Holofernes, who is leading a siege against the Israelites. She visits him over the course of three nights, and, after gaining his trust and favour, she and her maidservant enter his tent and behead him, igniting a spirit of rebellion within the Israelites. Her role as a seductress in the deuterocanonical tradition carries over into the Western artistic and literary tradition in the Middle Ages and early modern period. Her beauty is the vehicle through which she is able to enact violence against the Assyrian general. Her devotion to God, however, distinguishes her from various “wicked women” and “temptress” traditions that might have been applied to her. She is traditionally characterized as selflessly using her beauty not for her own means but to save her people; she is a virtuous woman, God’s beautiful handmaiden.
The Old English poem Judith, composed sometime between the eighth and the tenth century, differs from many of the later traditions in some important ways. (There is no evidence that the two traditions are connected.) She is depicted as a young maiden and not a widow. She also is not cast as a seductress. In the fragment of the poem that survives, it is clear that it is her faith, not her seductive appeal to Holofernes, that is central to her schemes. Her beauty, coupled with her prudence and her faith, ensures she is able to slay the enemy.
From the outset of the poem, Judith’s beauty and steadfast faith are contrasted with the extravagance and drunkenness of Holofernes’s banquet. We meet a “lady of supernatural beauty” with “firm belief in the Almighty” who navigates cups filled to the brim with wine, drunken bodies, “mead-mad” revelers. Then we are faced with a shouting Holofernes, encouraging gluttony and overindulgence. After the mead jars have emptied, Holofernes displays his desire for Judith. He requires Judith to be “laden with rings” and “draped with bangles,” a desire for excess that characterizes Holofernes’s depraved nature. However, it is his desire for Judith, a woman sage of spirit, that completes this scene of depravity.
Although we are meant to be as enamored of Judith’s beauty as Holofernes is, it is clear, with references to her wisdom and her spiritual prudence, that we are not dealing with a temptress. Holofernes would have preferred to “sully” Judith, but this “saintly woman” is outside his grasp. Judith’s external beauty matches her virtuousness. Holofernes is devoid of any shared traits with Judith. His relation to Judith is one of a heathen to a Christian; her Jewishness is abandoned. These religious dynamics set Judith’s physical beauty on the foundation of her spiritual beauty (virtue), presenting her as a blemishless hero-maiden, one who is worthy of beheading the general. Once the poem situates Holofernes as someone who leads a life that is alien to Christianity, Judith can then strike in “righteousness.” Judith’s violence can only exist in relation to Holofernes’s flaws.
Violence in this case does not erode Judith’s beauty. She can remain the “lady of supernatural beauty” who is “sage of spirit.” Her beauty is neither transcended nor sacrificed as she raises her sword and removes the head of Holofernes, the “heathen dog.” Instead, Judith is allowed to shift between different modes of relations to the world. She is not bound by the limits prescribed to the beautiful, nor is her beauty extinguished.
How then is the beauty associated with Judith altered when, in the Renaissance, a black (person) is inserted as her attendant, particularly when one does not look at the insertion of the black simply as a trope? There is a tendency among art historians to analyze the presence of the black within Western artistic traditions as devoid of any value; the black is, say, a beautiful charm, or a sighting of silence, or evidence of the sub/superhuman status of the black within the Western imagination. However, these analyses often foreclose any alternative reading. How might these analyses change if we traced the relationships between the variations, attending to the presence of the black attendant not as a trope without any substance but as a dense aesthetic signifier, shifting the various relations between the subjects within the paintings? Paolo Veronese’s Judith and Holofernes (1580), Titian’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1570), and Johan Liss’s Judith in the Tent of Holofernes (1622) all provide fertile ground for exploring these relations, particularly as they converge with violence, beauty, and race.
Veronese’s Judith and Holofernes presents a stark contrast between the beauty of Judith and her black attendant. The latter is hunched over, pointing firmly toward an exit that is outside the panel. Her arms and shoulders are muscular, akin to Holofernes’s lifeless body, and her face is slightly distorted, hardened even. This highlights her exaggerated nose and thick lips. Her ear is pierced, unlike Holofernes’s head or Judith’s. She wears a pearl, which distances her from the abstract label of heathen, associating her with Saracens (or Ethiopians). Her body language controls the direction and flow of the painting; she directs Judith, who appears uncertain and hesitant. Judith’s face is softened, having an almost passive look, as if she has only stained her hands with blood because it was necessary. Could her hesitancy preserve a virtue that would be spoiled by wanton violence?
The black is a suture, a way of allowing Judith to hold all the ruptures and discontinuities between violence and beauty within the eyes of the viewer.
The contrasting body language of the two women heightens the differences between the softness of their faces and their physiques. Judith is not triumphant; her adornments and her fair skin are more central than any one aspect of her physical behaviour. Who triumphs then? The black? The Israelites outside the frame? How could this violence create a rupture when Judith is so soft, so green with inexperience? What’s more, the dead man seems to be an afterthought to the painting, crammed into the corner like the furniture and armour, almost consumed by the shadows. When its placement is contrasted with the placement of the black, the viewer cannot help but conclude the positioning of the black is not inconsequential or incidental. The somatic difference of the black operates as an immediate indicator of the other. The black is a suture, a way of allowing Judith to hold all the ruptures and discontinuities between violence and beauty within the eyes of the viewer. There is a potential event of transference, a moment when all that would have hardened Judith is given to the body of her attendant. What does it mean for the black body? If she now extinguishes the violent ruptures within Judith, does the black body become the site of violence itself, a body devoid of beauty?
Titian’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes has done away with Holofernes’s body altogether—only the head remains. The black is clearly less of an attendant and is modelled after the “black page,” which appears in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century aristocratic portraiture. The black is hidden by the shadows; he wears a “Saracen bandana” instead of a head covering, which clearly marks him as a boy. The touch of red near his ear, a red-gem earring, replaces the pearl earring in Veronese’s painting. Both Judith and the little boy are calm and composed. It is striking that Judith is almost one and a half times larger than the boy. Her pale skin, blond hair, and pearls give her the look of a goddess from a classical scene; she is posed like Peter Paul Rubens’s Venus at a Mirror. It is almost as if a violent beheading has not occurred. The scene’s focus has shifted. The violence almost escapes enframing—no, it has almost been done away with altogether. Is this a Medici portrait with a servant and a beheading? Is the black a garnish? A Kantian charm adorning the margins of the painting? He is not directing the scene like the black woman in Veronese’s painting. His gesture is not even completely in the frame. Could the black’s enframement render his aid inconsequential? The black reveals something of Judith’s status: Titian’s Judith contains multiplicities, but is she the flame or the salamander? Is the intention of this image to capture Judith, her triumph, her beauty, her wealth? Is the black a marker of wealth and status, Judith’s literal trinket?
The act of violence is already complete—this is a scene of triumph. Titian’s Judith is neither dependent on the directions of the black nor without fervour, as Veronese’s Judith. Violence occurs outside the panel. If a modern viewer looks intently enough, it is almost as if Titian attempted to capture a different type of violence. Perhaps a glimpse into a violence that compels the viewer to preserve it?
Liss’s Judith in the Tent of Holofernes gives a different glimpse into the synthesis of violence and beauty. The viewer is first drawn to Holofernes’s “lifeless trunk” leaking blood. Then, as our eyes finish tracing the red hues, we find Judith’s blush-red cheeks, which are the colour of briar. Here Judith isn’t posed for a portrait, nor is she looking to her attendant for aid. She looks back at the viewer with resolve in her eyes. There is something haunting yet beautiful in her contented stare. She is not quite smiling, but can relief be located somewhere in her face? Her gaze captivates the viewer, so much that one almost does not return to Holofernes’s contorted body—but if one does not look through Judith’s piercing glare, and behind the body, one almost misses his head! Beyond Judith’s stare and behind the barely legible head, one captures a black woman. Her colours are muted; she almost blends into the opening of the tent. Her brown head covering and brown bag share the same colour. She is ready to receive the bleeding head from Judith. Neither she nor Judith is focused on the task. It is almost as if Holofernes has disappeared: the black is focused on Judith, who has her eyes fixed on us.
If the black marvels at Judith, those who catch sight of her marvel at her instead.
Is this a wonderful scene of intersubjectivity? Are we supposed to be captured by their lines of stares? Or should we attend to the bleeding body? I return to the black girl’s eyes. Are they filled with amazement? Fear? Uncertainty? These eyes, really a single eye, reveal so much and so little at the same time. Does she marvel at Judith’s faith in her? In God? In the blade that she has as yet to relinquish? I can’t quite capture the expression of the black girl. Judith’s expression is quite straightforward, so perhaps it is the black who reflects the true emotion of the scene. The various emotions collapse into blackness’s void; the moving parts construct a Judith who truly is both hero and maiden, both parts equally mixed, both parts made apparent in her rose-coloured cheeks and the firm grip of her sword. If the black marvels at Judith, those who catch sight of her marvel at her instead.
The attendants in the paintings of Judith slaying Holofernes by Caravaggio and Gentileschi are both white. What does it mean for Judith’s attendant to be transfigured into an African? What aesthetic and material claims are being made when the lily-cheeked attendant is transformed into a black subject? One is a claim about the other; another is about the relationality among the three subjects.
In each painting Holofernes remains a non-believer, but he is no longer Judith’s opposition, at least not in the purest sense. Having no existence of his own, he becomes mere ornamentation, like the furniture or armour in the background. His value, or lack thereof, is pre- or overdetermined, leaving the paintings to highlight the relationship between Judith and the black. The black occupies (to the viewer) a state of dislocation, the position of otherness.
Judith’s violent beauty in the Old English poem provides a setting for the relation between violence and beauty in the later Judith tradition in Western art. None of this is to claim that the artistic and literary traditions are directly related to one another, nor is it to claim that later painters were familiar with the Old English poem. The Judith poem nevertheless illuminates how violence creates an otherness within the self; violence extinguishes the will to preserve beauty. It makes the self foreign to itself. The depictions of Judith by Veronese, Titian, and Liss use the black attendant as a means to redress this rupture in the self. The black becomes a suture, a “gentle negress” or a young black page, at the service of the scene.
Existence, the means through which one relates to the world, becomes mapped onto the flesh. It is enough that the black is black. That alone begins to constitute difference, to reconfigure violence. We find ourselves entering an all-too-familiar tale: to be black is to be destined. But for what? Pessimism? An existence devoid of value? Exile from humanity? What is true is that to be black means to be dislocated, for the very grounds of relation to be filtered through antagonism, not quite visible to the naked eye, not quite empty.