Why Did Artemisia Gentileschi Paint Judith Beheading Holofernes So Many Times?
A biblical widow, a sleeping general, and the seventeenth-century woman who returned to the scene again and again.
Artemisia Gentileschi painted the story of Judith and Holofernes at least six times between about 1612 and 1645. The subject was popular with Baroque patrons and she was a professional who painted what sold, but her versions are unusually physical and unflinching: Judith and her maid hold the general down and saw through his neck. Many readers connect that intensity to her rape by the painter Agostino Tassi in 1611 and the public trial that followed; art historians caution that she also chose the subject because it showcased what she did best.
The scene comes from the Book of Judith. An Assyrian general, Holofernes, is besieging a Jewish town. A widow named Judith walks into his camp, charms her way into his tent, waits until he is drunk and asleep, and cuts off his head with his own sword. Her maid carries it home in a basket. The siege collapses.
Painters loved this story for centuries. It has a beautiful woman, a villain, a sword, and a moral. Most of them painted the moment after: Judith composed, the head already in the basket, a little blood for interest. Artemisia Gentileschi painted the moment itself.
The Uffizi version
Look at the picture at the top of this page. Judith is not composed. She is working. Her sleeves are rolled, her forearms are braced, and she leans back from the spray while the blade goes through. The maid is not waiting with a basket; she is pinning the general's arms. Holofernes is awake. Blood runs down the sheets in ropes. It is a painting about effort, and about two women doing a job together.
Artemisia painted it around 1620 in Florence, most likely for the Medici, and it now hangs in the Uffizi. For a long time the museum kept it in a dim corner. It is now one of the most visited pictures in the building.
She had already painted it once
The Uffizi canvas is the second version. The first, painted around 1612 or 1613 when she was about nineteen, is in Naples at the Museo di Capodimonte. It is smaller, the composition is tighter, and the violence is, if anything, closer to the viewer.
The dating matters, because of what happened in 1611. Artemisia was seventeen and training in her father Orazio's Roman workshop when Agostino Tassi, a painter her father had hired to teach her perspective, raped her. Orazio brought charges the following year. The trial lasted seven months, the transcripts survive, and they record that Artemisia was tortured with thumbscrews to test whether she was telling the truth. She held to her testimony. Tassi was convicted and served no meaningful sentence.
The first Judith was painted within a year or two of that trial. It is hard not to read the two together, and for the last fifty years most people have.
The revenge reading, and its limits
The idea that Artemisia painted Judith as revenge on Tassi is irresistible, and it may be partly true. But it flattens her. She painted this story for more than thirty years, long after the trial, for patrons in Florence, Rome, and Naples who commissioned it because they liked it. She was one of the most successful painters of her generation, the first woman admitted to Florence's Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, and a businesswoman who wrote sharp letters to clients about her prices. She chose Judith because Judith let her paint what she was best at: strong bodies, hard light, cloth, blood, and women who act.
The 1610 canvas now in Florence's Palazzo Pitti shows a different moment, the two women pausing with the head in a basket, alert to a sound.
The candlelit version in Detroit
Her most ambitious treatment is not the beheading at all. It is the escape. Painted around 1623 to 1625 and now at the Detroit Institute of Arts, it shows Judith and the maid in the tent a moment after the killing, lit by a single candle, frozen by something they have heard. Judith's hand shades the flame. The head is going into the sack. Nothing is happening and everything is at stake. It is one of the great pictures of suspense in Western art.
Where Caravaggio fits
Artemisia's father knew Caravaggio, and Caravaggio's own Judith Beheading Holofernes of around 1599 hangs in Rome. His Judith is a young woman recoiling from her own act, holding the sword at arm's length as if it might bite her. Artemisia would have known the picture. Her answer to it is the Uffizi canvas: a Judith who does not recoil. That difference, more than any biographical detail, is what she brought to the story.
She returned to it until the end
A late version, painted around 1645 in Naples, is again at Capodimonte. By then she was in her fifties, running a large workshop, and the handling is broader. The subject still held her.
Where to see them
The two beheadings are in Italy: Naples (Capodimonte) and Florence (Uffizi). The candlelit escape is in Detroit. The Pitti version is a short walk from the Uffizi across the Arno. If you can only see one, see the Uffizi canvas, and stand close enough to see the brushwork in the blood.
Open Artemisia Gentileschi on DiscoverArt to see every Judith side by side, along with her Cleopatras, her Lucretia, and the Mary Magdalene she painted for the Medici. We also tell her story alongside other painters history pushed aside in the women artists history overlooked.
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