Judith with the Head of Holophernes

Baldung's Judith with the Head of Holophernes from 1525 depicts the Old Testament widow-heroine who saved Israel by seducing and decapitating the Assyrian general threatening Jerusalem. Judith was a subject of particular ambiguity in Renaissance and Reformation painting: simultaneously a celebration of feminine heroism, a warning about female sexual power, and a Protestant allegory of faith over tyranny. Baldung's treatments of Judith combine the sensuous Italianate beauty he brought to female figures with the menacing quality that pervades his depictions of women as dangerous forces. The 1525 date—in the midst of the Peasants' War and the early Reformation crisis—may have given the subject additional political resonance as an image of successful resistance to an overwhelming threatening power. Baldung's Judith is among the most psychologically compelling versions of the subject in German Renaissance painting.

The dramatic subject is rendered with Baldung's characteristic intensity, the contrast between Judith's beauty and the severed head creating a disturbing visual tension.