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![hubbychu:
Judith beheading Holofernes, c.1597-1600
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
Galleria Nazionale, Rome
Oil on canvas 145 x 195 cm
“Cited by Baglione (1642) as a work painted for the Genovese Costa family, the Judith is recorded in the 1632 will of Ottavio Costa (Spezzaferro, 1975), which explicitly states that the painting was to remain in the possession of the family. In modern times, the painting was considered lost until Pico Cellini’s 1950 discovery of it in the collection of the Coppi family, who had received it by descent from the Del Cinque Quintili family (Mochi Onori 1986: Marini 1989). Exhibited for the first time in the 1951 exhibition on Caravaggism, the painting was unanimously acclaimed as one of the greatest masterpieces of Caravaggio. The Judith is datable to the last years of the sixteenth century, through the precise dating oscillates between 1597 and 1600. As in other canvases carried out during this moment – the Thyssen Magdalene, for example, which Caravaggio employed the same model who posed for the Judith – this picture perfectly exemplifies the artist’s passage from the lighter painting of his youth towards the new naturalistic vision that he defined thoroughly in his canvases in the Contarelli chapel.
The first instance in which Caravaggio would chose such a highly dramatic subject (Gregori, 1985), the Judith is an expression of an allegorical-moral contest in which Virtue overcomes Evil (Calvesi 1972). In contrast to the elegant and distant beauty of the vexed Judith, the ferocity of the scene is concentrated in the inhuman scream and body spasm of the giant Holofernes. Caravaggio has managed to render, with exceptional efficacy, the most dreaded moment in a man’s life: the passage from life to death. The upturned eyes of Holofernes indicate that he is not alive anymore, yet signs of life still persist in the screaming mouth, the contracting body and the hand that still grips at the bed. The original bare breasts of Judith, which suggest that she has just left the bed, were later covered by the semi-transparent blouse.
The roughness of the details and the realistic precision with which the horrific decapitation is rendered (correct down to the tiniest details of anatomy and physiology) has led to the hypothesis that the painting was inspired by two highly publicised contemporary Roman executions; that of Giordano Bruno and above all of Beatrice Cenci in 1599.” (Guide to the National Gallery of Ancient Art – Palazzo Barberini, 2009)
“Judith beheading Holofernes was Caravaggio’s first truly violent narrative, a type of scene which would increasingly come to dominate his work. The story, which is taken from the apocryphal Book of Judith (13: 7-8), relates how a Jewish widow saved her nation from the Assyrians by first beguiling their general into excessive indulgence and then decapitating him. Judith had entered the enemy camp in her finest garments accompanied only by her maidservant Abra, who, the gory deed done, helped to bundle the trophy into a sack. Traditionally the story was seen as an allegory of Virtue and Vice, but Caravaggio transformed it into a realistic human saga of intense psychological resonance. Secluded within the dark confines of Holofernes’ tent, the figures are pushed against the picture plane like a classical frieze. The elegantly clad Judith approaches her gruesome task with icy determination. Holofernes is not yet dead – his body arches in a final spasm of life, his eyes spiral in delirium and his blood spurts in long, red rivulets – but Judith recoils only slightly. Post-Tridentine theologians demanded strict adherence to biblical texts and Caravaggio’s violent re-enactment is clearly more faithful in this sense than earlier versions which merely depicted the decapitation as a fait accompli. Nevertheless, Caravaggio’s picture is disturbing from a religious point of view. Judith’s classic beauty stands in stark contrast to the grisly act, giving the scene a disturbing, darkly erotic flavour, in which the wizened Abra takes on the role of a procuress. X-radiographs reveal that at one point Caravaggio intended to show Judith bare-breasted. In the final version she is discreetly covered, but her erect nipples still indicate a degree of sexual arousal. During the recent restoration an unusual inscription on the back of the original canvas was brought to light: ‘C.O.C.’. It has been suggested that the initials stand for ‘Collezione Ottavio Costa’. Costa, who is generally assumed to have commissioned the picture, stipulated in his will of 1623 that his heirs were not to part with any of his paintings by Caravaggio, especially the Judith.” (The Genius of Rome 1592-1623, ed. Beverley Louise Brown, Royal Academy of Arts 2001)
“Caravaggio’s picture – probably executed shortly before 1600 – was one of the first in which he took up the challenge of creating a full-blown narrative history painting. The subject of Judith had long been popular in Italian art, but Caravaggio unusually chose to depict the most horrific moment in the story of the beautiful Jewish widow, Judith who, together with her maid, stole into the camp of the Assyrian army that was besieging her home town of Bethulia. Using her charms, and dressed ‘to allure the eyes of all men that should see her’ (Judith 10:4), she won the trust of the commanding officer Holofernes, who invited her to dine in his tent with the purpose of seducing her. According to the Apocryphal Book of Judith, she was ‘left alone in the tent, and Holofernes lying along his bed: for he was filled with wine. Now Judith had commanded her maid to stand without her bedchamber, and to wait for her […]. So all went forth, and none was left in the bedchamber, neither little or great. Then Judith, standing by his bed, said in her heart, O Lord God of all power, look at this present upon the works of mine hands for the exaltation of Jerusalem. For now is the time to help thine inheritance, and to execute mine enterprises to the destruction of the enemies which are risen against us. Then she came to the pillar of the bed, which was at Holofernes’ head, and took down his fauchion from thence. And approached to his bed, and took hold of the hair of his head, and said, Strengthen me, O Lord God of Israel, this day. And she smote twice upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him’ (Judith 13:2-8). She placed his head in a sack carried by her maid, and returned triumphantly with it to Bethulia. faced with the mutilated body of their general and the sight of his head hanging from the battlements of the town, the Assyrians raised the siege and fled.
[…] Caravaggio’s impressively staged depiction of the death-throes of Holofernes, who with staring eyes and open shrieking mouth howls against his fate, is quite clearly intended to disturb the spectator through its harsh actuality, the force of which is heightened by the static nature of the composition. Without precisely describing the dark space further than to suggest an air of close confinement, Caravaggio places his figures close to the picture plane, the horizontal format allowing him to follow the text describing Judith’s approach to the bed. He then freezes the action, fixing the narrative at its most terrifying moment. It is with a mixture of disgust and reluctance that Judith calmly but firmly delivers the fatal stroke, her body bent slightly backwards as it she was literally keeping her distance from the victim, while her pleated bodice, which emphasises her breasts, is given a corset-like stiffness. The impassive stare of the servant, whose wrinkled face and toothless mouth are counterpoised with the youthful beauty of her mistress, reinforces the powerful erotic charge that Caravaggio brings to the scene. The sharp contrast of facial features is one that Caravaggio exploited throughout his career, and may be connected to the writings of his Lombard contemporary and compatriot, Gregorio Comanini, who recommended painters to juxtapose sharply contrasting types in their paintings. But more than that, it is the servant’s presence as voyeur that adds to the viewer’s disquiet. She has seen it all before and her function, as Helen Langdon has cogently remarked, is reminiscent of the aged procuresses so frequently introduced as onlookers into erotic paintings of the 16th century.” (Rembrandt/Caravaggio, ed. Duncan Bull, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam 2006)
“M’s next and last painting of Fillide – they were all done in the space of a year or so, after which his infatuation or her availability seemed to end – was another that seemed to be reverberating with the horror of the Cenci episode. Judith was a popular figure in art and one of the few young female action subjects – Donatello, Botticelli and Giorgione had all done her beheading the tyrant Holofernes. Mostly after the event – like David, the calm young liberator with or without the trophy head. M now showed the intimate and wholly private horror of the murder itself. He returned to multiple figure paintings with a leap into a kind of convulsed and hideous movement he’d barely hinted at before. He now caught the rapt stare of a crabbed servant woman – M’s first working old person – waiting at the picture’s right edge with a cloth to wrap the head in when it was finally hacked free of the body. He caught the cramped but violent tensing of Holofernes’ nude body on the bed, crazily angled from his partly detached head, a repelled and frowning Judith’s determined sawing, her grip on the hair of the nearly severed head, and the ropes of blood that jetted on to the pillow and the fold of sheet Holofernes was clutching in his agony.
The dark bedroom setting, the sheets and pillows and blankets and the knotted up heavy blood red canopy overhanging the act, enhanced the stifling, muffled intimacy of the killing and the identity of sex with violence. The drapes that muffled the moans of sex would soak up the dead man’s cry. This was very different from the Fortune Teller’s benign look at relations between the sexes. This was sex as war, old testament religion as modern domestic violence. It was sex as spasm, less violent movement than a series of linked tensions – in the gripping hands, Judith’s on the sword and head, Holofernes’ clutching the bed sheet and the old woman’s gripping the cloth – in the contracted muscles of Holofernes’ body, arched in death as in orgasm, in Judith’s powerful forearms and the clenched muscles of the old woman’s face – a face much like those in Leonardo’s drawings of old men. Nothing took the image beyond that reality – no history, no structure, no transcendence, no symbolism, just violent death.” (M, Peter Robb, 1998)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxhpbwc5ux1r2u95no1_1280.jpg)
