Judith Beheading Holofernes
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 to about 1656) · about 1620
Two women pin a man to his bed and one of them saws through his neck with a sword while blood soaks the sheets. There is no softening. Judith, the Jewish widow of the Old Testament, has entered the tent of the Assyrian general Holofernes, made him drunk, and now kills him to save her city. Her maid Abra holds him down with her whole weight. Artemisia Gentileschi painted this version in Florence around 1620, a few years after a first, smaller one now in Naples, and it is the most powerful treatment of the subject ever made.
Artemisia had learned from Caravaggio's example, and the composition uses his tools: a single hard light, a black background, figures pushed to the very front of the picture. But the physical logic is her own. Look at the way the two women's arms form a cross above the victim, at Judith's rolled sleeves and the tension in her forearms, and at the blood, which spurts in arcs that follow the physics of a cut artery. The bracelet on Judith's arm shows tiny figures of Diana, goddess of the hunt and of chastity, a signature of sorts.
The canvas was painted for the Medici, probably for Cosimo II, and for a long time it was kept out of sight because it was thought too disturbing. Modern viewers often read it in the light of the artist's own life: in 1612 she had testified in the Roman trial of the painter who raped her. Whatever its personal meaning, it shows a woman artist claiming the grandest subject matter of her age. A memorable detail is Holofernes's fist, clenched in the maid's dress, still fighting at the moment of death.
Did You Know? Judith's bracelet shows tiny images of Diana, the virgin goddess of the hunt, whose name in Italian is close to Artemisia's own.
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