Erzsébet Báthory (1560-1614) was a real life Hungarian noblewoman and purported serial killer who may have engaged in vampiric activity. Her victims were female servants and minor noblewomen who had come to her for training and education. I’m not sure what training or education the noblewomen were seeking, but maybe they should have stuck with correspondence courses. According to one source I found, she is the holder of the Guinness World Record as history’s most prolific female murderer. She shattered that glass ceiling by killing anywhere from 80 to possibly 650 victims. The Lady was busy!
Legend has it that Bathory believed that she could maintain her youth by bathing in the blood of virgins. Some of the accounts I’ve read dispute this as being the type of fanciful folklore that grows around horrific stories, but it might explain why four of her servants stood trial and were convicted for their crimes. A Lady isn’t going to draw her own bath!
She was not related to the more famous Dracula family although a fictionalized movie of her life titled Countess Dracula was made. She did have a nephew who was a prince of Transylvania.
Lady Bathory is a belated entry in this year’s collection of Halloween Heads which is a series of vector illustrations I have produced in Affinity Designer. I started this one a while back; stopped for some reason, and forgot all about it. I found it while deleting some files I thought were unnecessary and decided to give it another go.
Below is a screen capture of the Affinity Designer program on a Mac. (It’s also available for Windows machines, and looks and works pretty much the same.) I have the split screen view on so you can see the illustration in color on the left, and the various vector paths which are the cartoon’s skeleton of sorts are on the right.
Interesting bit of history… She’d have been a LOT better off bathing in milk… Just sayin…
She would have, but it wouldn’t work for me. I’d be left illustrating an eccentric aristocrat who was into dairy.