Judith und Holofernes (Scheibenriss)

All the drawings we know of by Dirck Crabeth

(1510/20–1574), a master glass painter, were created

in connection with his professional glasswork.

Crabeth came from a family of glass painters: his

father, Pieter Dirksz. (died c. 1542/52), as well as

his brothers, Adriaen Petersz. (1510–1530/33) and

Wouter (1510–1589), were active in this craft. His

commissions took him to Utrecht, The Hague, and

Amsterdam, among other places. However, it is his

work on the famous glass windows in the Church of

Sint Jan in his native Gouda that is regarded as his

masterpiece and the apex of his career.

After a fire in 1552, the imposing church—the

largest ecclesiastical structure in the Northern

Netherlands, with a nave 123 meters long—was to

be adorned with new, magnificent windows. The

Church of Sint Jan was closely connected with the

city because of its dedication to Saint John the

Baptist, Gouda’s patron saint. Moreover, the church

was city property and was intended to serve as

a symbol of Gouda, which had risen to become

a thriving commercial hub due to its strategic

location at the confluence of the Hollandse IJssel

and Gouwe rivers as well as its cloth production,

cheese, and beer trade. The monumental, lightsoaked

stained-glass windows included depictions

of biblical events and scenes from Netherlandish

history and were, in the truest sense, envisioned as

a beacon for residents and visitors to the city alike.

Dirck Crabeth personally executed eight of the large

windows between 1554 and 1571, while five smaller

windows were produced in the workshop after his

designs. Four more windows were produced by his

brother Wouter.

The present sheet, a vidimus (presentation

drawing) for one of the windows, is the last one

Dirck executed for the church. It depicts the biblical

story of the beautiful widow Judith, who saved

her besieged city of Bethulia from the invading

forces of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II.1

One night, she snuck into the Babylonian camp

and seduced the enemy general, Holofernes, with

wine and her beauty. After he fell asleep, she

beheaded him with his own sword. In the drawing

the naked Holofernes, already decapitated, lies

upon the ground. Judith is in the act of placing his

severed head into a sack held open by her maid.

On the left, the viewer sees Holofernes’s splendid

tent, his rumpled bed with his breastplate hanging

beside it, and the festive table. Holofernes’s body,

greatly foreshortened and twisted in the Mannerist

style, and the women’s contrived postures and

clothing emphasizing their bodies reveal Crabeth

to be an exponent of Netherlandish Romanism: he

clearly oriented himself to Italian models and to

Netherlandish contemporaries such as Maarten van

Heemskerck (1498–1574) [36, 37, 72] and Frans Floris

the Elder (1515/20–1570).2

In line with the iconographical tradition of Judith

and Holofernes, the sheet features simultaneous

narration, with events starting in the foreground

and then progressing to the background. On

the left, the two women return unchallenged to

Bethulia, the target of the invaders’ cannons. On

the right, the Ammonite general, Achior, is shackled

to a tree as punishment for his attempt to dissuade

Holofernes from attacking the Israelites, since they

would remain invincible as long as God protected

them.3 Above right, the head of Holofernes, impaled

on a lance, can be discerned high upon the city

walls of Bethulia. The enemy has fled following the

discovery of their general’s death. Thus, through

her cunning, Judith has saved the Jewish people.

In his vidimus, Crabeth sketched in the vertical

lights (or panes) and lead ties in order to convey

an idea of the window’s appearance to its patron,

Margaretha van der Marck, Duchess of Arenberg

(1527–1599). He later produced a full-size cartoon

that served as the model for the execution of the

11.3-by-4.8-meter window on the north side of the

nave.4 The cartoon and the window, both dated

1571, follow his preliminary sketch down to the

smallest detail, yet with one essential modification:

the cannons lined up in the middle ground have

been augmented with motifs from camp life, such

as the grilling of meat and the baking of bread.5 In

addition, below the Judith narrative, the completed

window portrays Margaretha van der Marck and

her late husband, Jean de Ligne (d. 1568), flanked

by their patron saints, Catherine of Alexandria6 and

John the Baptist, together with numerous coats of

arms (fig. 1). The present sheet’s status as a vidimus

has been known since the eighteenth century

because the Gouda connection had already been

established when the piece was auctioned from

the collection of the Netherlandish artist and art

collector Cornelis Ploos van Amstel (1726–1798).7

Although Old Testament subjects and thematic

cycles for stained-glass windows were popular in

the Netherlands, the choice of the story of Judith

had particular resonance at this moment. The creation

of this violent scene nearly coincided with the

start of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). Religious

conflicts, violence, and death were part and parcel

of Netherlandish life, endowing the narrative with

explosive topicality. Like Judith, the patroness was a

widow—whose husband, the stadtholder appointed

by the Spanish, had been killed on the battlefield at

Heiligerlee prior to the war—and following Judith’s

example, she embodied the ideal of a Christian

widow who defended the Catholic faith during a

time of war.8

In addition to his design and execution of the

stained-glass windows, Crabeth was closely associated

with Sint Jan in other ways as well. Between

1552 and 1558, he is documented as having served as

one of its kerkmeesters (church wardens), who were

responsible for a variety of secular duties, including

building maintenance, glassworks inspection, and

communication with benefactors and patrons.9

Crabeth’s stained-glass windows in Gouda survived

the religious wars and the destructive attacks of the

iconoclasts. Together with the cartoon, this preliminary

rendering provides contemporary insight into

the origins and execution of one of the most prestigious

stained-glass projects in the sixteenth-century

Netherlands.

 

1. Judith 13:1–10.

2. Crabeth probably derived inspiration for his composition

from a series on Judith and Holofernes engraved by Philips

Galle (1537–1612) in 1564; see Van Eck et al. 2002, 129; Van Eck

2020, 134, fig. 4.7. The copy in the Albertina is DG47130–37,

H/I/11/33–36.

3. Judith 5:3–6, 8.

4. The cartoon is in the archive of the Sint Janskerk.

5. Cf. Van Ruyven-Zeman 2011, part 2, 527; Van Eck 2020, 138,

which address the Israelites’ subsequent celebration of their

liberation (Judith 15:6–7).

6. Regarding the choice of Saint Catherine instead of Saint

Margaret, see Van Eck 2020, 136.

7. To date, a total of fourteen such presentation drawings by

Crabeth have been identified. Van Ruyven-Zeman 2012, 10.

8. See Van Eck 2020, 134–43.

9. Van Eck 2020, 7.

 

Emily J. Peters, Laura M. Ritter (Hg.), AK Tales of the City. Drawing in the Netherlands from Bosch to Bruegel, Cleveland Museum of Art 9.10.2022 - 8.1.2023, New Haven 2022, Kat. Nr. 34