Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio

Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio, 1598-1599

In 1599 caravaggio produces the painting of Judith and Holofernes, which became one of the most treasured possessions of Ottavio Costa, who, in his will of 1632, was to specify that his heirs should not, under any circumstances, part with 'any of the paintings of Caravaggio, and particularly not the Judith'. Judith's story is told in her book in the Apocrypha, a book rejected by the Protestants, but included in the Sixto-Clementine Bible of 1592.

This tells how the Jewish heroine Judith, a rich and beautiful widow, heroically saved her people from destruction at the hands of Holofernes, the Assyrian general. She dressed in her richest clothes, 'so as to catch the eye of any man who might see her' and with her maid, Abra, entered the enemy camp. Holofernes was beguiled into excessive indulgence, and while he lies in a drunken stupor, she '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'. Abra, keeping watch outside the tent, quickly bundled their gory trophy into a sack.

Judith was immensely popular throughout the sixteenth century; she came to be seen as prefiguring the Virgin Mary, and as symbolising the Church. In these hectic years, aflame with missionary zeal, when the churches of Rome displayed the tortures meted out to early martyrs, she suggests the response of a militant Church, wreaking terror on heretics and sinners. In the theatre of the Sacra Rappresentazione (a very popular play, entitled La Rappresentazione di Judith Hebrea of 1518, was reprinted many times through the century, and again in the Jubilee Year) her story was presented on stage, with gory violence. In Judith, a Latin drama by Tuccio, Judith is a type of Mary, whose cold killing of Holofernes is the fulfilment of a sacred duty, and she prays for strength from God.

The execution, on stage, is like a rite. 'Do you wish to see', comments the chorus, 'with what force, with what protection, Mary conquers the enemy? This will Judith teach you ... In his interpretation Caravaggio, for the first time confronting the problems of dramatic narrative, created an image of horrifying violence. Holofernes is shown, as Medusa had been, at the very moment of death, his head at the meeting point of strong diagonals. He shrieks, and blood jets spring from the gash. The space is enclosed, and the dark red of the tent the colour of blood. There is no space between the half-length figures, brought close to the picture plane, so that the viewer, thrust up against nst the actors, becomes intensely involved in the drama.

Although a widow, Judith, partly in white, has an icy, virginal quality, her polished face a cold and formal beauty (the model was not Fillide, though she has a similar style of beauty; she may have been Geronima Giustiniani). Her expression is appalled yet intent, and her heavy gesture has a ritual quality. She is very much a Judith of the 1590s, close to that of Tuccio, the chaste and strong instrument of God, her implacable mission to destroy the devil, as Mary, in a later painting, is to tread on the serpent. (Judith's chastity had been celebrated by the Church Fathers, and it had been emphasised by St Jerome, who added his own phrase to the Latin Vulgate And chastity was joined to her virtue'.) Holofernes, animal-like, is an incarnation of evil, suggesting the damned souls in many renderings of the Last Judgement.

The ritual quality, the frozen expressions and gestures, are also the product of Caravaggio's method of painting from posed models. Incised lines are visible in the picture's surface � around Judith's left arm and shoulder, around the neck of the elderly maid, and around Holofernes' head -- and it seems that Caravaggio, working from models, used them, here and elsewhere, to fix the crucial elements of his composition. But he could not cut off his model's head, and X-rays have revealed that he must have asked the model to take a different pose as he developed the composition. His working method, after nature, gave his picture the immediacy of a tableau vivant, perhaps like those that were performed for the jubilee."

Caravaggio nevertheless gave to these symbolic figures a new and bloody reality, and shows Holofernes awake, aware at the moment of death rather than, as earlier artists had done, in a comatose slumber. It is extremely likely that the Cenci execution, which enthralled all Rome, had a deep impact upon his imagination (as it may also have done on that of the young Artemisia Gentileschi), and it is this that accounts for the picture's immediacy.' This immediacy creates a disturbing ambiguity, transforming the scene into a sado-erotic drama, suggesting a Senecan fascination with horror, blood and sex, personified by Abra, who recalls the procurers in other, less virtuous scenes.

It was a fascination shared by writers and poets, and Federico Bella Valle, whose tragedy, Judith, written at the turn of the century, is set in the dark and enclosed places of prison or encampment, returned to the image as though to an appalling and compulsive obsession. In The Queen of Scotland he lingers erotically on the decapitation of the Catholic martyr Mary Queen of Scots, whose body seems still to tremble after her death:

... the blade, death-dealing, Which, as it struck, sank deep Into the snowy flesh, into that lovely neck, And thus, her limbs stretched to one side, Her head to the other, she remained A trembling corpse, whence blood gushed forth From her soft throat: Her so sweet mouth, Drawing its final breath, Was seen to open one more time, And then to close for ever, Graceful, even in the pangs Of her horrendous death ...

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