This project which was carried out for the exam of Electronic Publishing and Digital Storytelling held by professor Marilena Daquino at the University of Bologna aims to examine two of the most important biblical female images - Judith and Salome - in pictorial art. In the Biblical story, Judith is a widow living a chaste life when the Assyrian army lays siege to her town. As the leaders wait for God to intervene, Judith decides to take action by asking God to grant her the power to deceive and kill Holofernes. The popularity of this biblical story is very high. Judith became a key figure in Italy, especially in Florentine culture. However, the image of Judith is troubling in that it features a woman physically victorious over a man, which was highly unusual for the time. This was especially significant for the city of Florence whose patron saint, John the Baptist, was famously beheaded by another Biblical woman: Salome, who is a Jewish princess who obtained from King Herod the execution of John the Baptist thanks to her beauty and seductiveness. Both Judith and Salome are typically defined by the beheadings, but the ideological content of these images is completely different. Noticing how interestingly these images intersect with each other, we asked ourselves the following questions:
- Who was still portrayed more often, Judith or Salome?
- In which cultures is Judith more popular, and in which cultures is Salome? Is the image of Judith really more popular in Italy, as reported in art history articles?
- In what period of time was Judith more popular, and when did the popularity of images of Salome grow? Were they the same or different periods?
The general goal of the project is to answer art history questions about the relation between two of the most significant female biblical images - Judith and Salome - using open data from Wikidata and to make a map reflecting the distribution of paintings depicting these heroines in time and space.
• Ekaterina Kolevatova: Data collection, data manipulation, data cleaning and data analysis.
• Ludovica Russo: Web development, data visualization, communication strategy.