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Execution | Jun 06 2002

My friend John Shaw introduced me to the two paintings, below, of Judith’s beheading of Holofernes. Caravaggio painted the first; the second was by Artemisia Gentilesch, a woman whose father, Orazio, was Caravaggio’s student.

Judith’s story, in case you don’t know it (I didn’t), is, um, captivating. The Jewish town of Bethulia was under seige by the Assyrians. Judith, a rich and beautiful widow, decided to save her people by assassinating the Assyrian general, Holofernes. Pretending to have abandoned her people, Judith went to Holefernes and fed him a bunch of crap about how victory would soon be his because the Jews had sinned against god and because he, Holefernes, was so “competent, rich in experience, and distinguished in military strategy,” etc. Holofernes, taken by Judith’s words (among other things), invited her into his tent. His intention was to seduce her, but he drank so much wine (more than he ever had!) that he collapsed in a stupor. Judith said a quick prayer and cut off the fool’s head with his own sword. She brought the severed head to the Hebrew defenders, who mounted it on the town’s ramparts. The Assyrian troops, now leaderless, were soon trounced.

John was fascinated by, among other things, how far the paintings veered from how the story is told in the bible, wherein Holofernes is beheaded with two swift blows of the sword. No doubt to demonstrate the intractability of my libidio, I found myself fixating on the fact that Gentilesch’s Judith is way less cute than Caravaggio’s (view detail), a particularly tasteless observation given that many historians consider Gentilesch’s painting a self-portrait. (Gentilesch was raped as a teenager by her teacher, a friend of her father’s, Agostino Tassi. Following the rape, Gentilesch’s work often depicted women taking revenge on male evildoers, thus the common reading of her paintings as revenge fantasies.)

While researching this piece, I found several other depictions of the Judith’s triumph, my favorite of which was executed by Dean Brown, using Barbie dolls. Sweet.