Women with Swords...on the way to the Stake?

One line of imagery that seemed to interest Cranach was Death and the Maiden. Biblical stories such as Judith and Holofernes depicted women as heroic defenders of Germany as well as provided cautionary tails for men. Even though Cranach painted at least 40 of them, there was not a single Judith in any of the churches and cathedrals we visited.
Looking on the internet I quickly located 23 versions painted by Cranach and his assistants. They are spread around the world in collections from NYC to Vienna, Frankfurt, Washington DC, Glasgow, Ponce, Kassel, Stuttgart, San Fransisco, Dublin, Syracuse, Cologne, Budapest, Greenville, and (one) in Berlin!
The paintings are enigmatic... decorative and almost titillating. Cranach painted aristocratic women richly dressed calmly smirking as they run their fingers through the hair of their decapitated foe. The lopped off head is most always shown with the gore and hints of vertebrae turned towards the viewer. It is a creepy yet elegant scene and I wonder if it in some way excited the male gaze of the 16th Century courts.

I am torn between thinking of them as a perfect revenge trope for the #MeToo movement or an early advertisement of warning that precludes the next half century of rabid witch burning. The paintings, made by a man for other men, might have been a best seller sold under the guise of patriotic heroines to admire, yet I don't think the women benefited from the depictions. The models were real women of the court and little is known about their lives. For men, the image clearly presents women's sexual behavior as a real threat to society. These paintings are of the vulnerability of man and the passionate, violent,  sexual beings of women.  These images would have justified retaliation by society. Within 50 years there is widespread "witch craze" through out Europe of the 1600's and 1700's.