Guided Pathway

At lower right, the final quadrant contains versions of the story of Judith, the Jewish woman who beheaded an enemy general, which directly follows the Book of Tobit in the Clementine Vulgate and its derivatives. Donatello’s bronze Judith (#21), one of the civic talismans of the Florentine Republic, is pure Siegerpathos, seizing Holofernes by his locks in what Warburg once described as the Perseusgriff, and raising her sword to finish her abject victim. In Ghirlandaio’s rendition of the scene, depicted twice at the panel’s lower edge (#25.1 and #25.1), Siegerpathos is confined to the grisaille relief in the background, in which a mounted soldier drives his spear into a fallen opponent. The foreground is dominated instead by the ninfa, here in the guise of Judith’s servant, who steps gracefully forward, bearing Holofernes’s severed head in place of the fruit basket.