Embodied temporality: Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici’s sacra storia, Donatello’s Judith, and the performance of gendered authority in Palazzo Medici, Florence

This essay approaches Donatello’s fifteenth-century bronze sculpture of Judith as a dramatic actor in Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici’s 'The Story of Judith, Hebrew Widow', written in the 1470s. The essay highlights the strategies by which Lucrezia’s narrative enfolds contemporary Florentine attitudes concerning justice, virtue, and political power into Judith’s sacred history and traces how the performative cues of Lucrezia's words functioned to connect her audience somaesthetically with the statue in the temporal setting of the garden of the Palazzo Medici. Ultimately the essay analyzes Lucrezia's self-fashioning in relation to both the textual and sculptural biblical heroine as a strategy to give voice to her critical role within the family and the state.