Judith Beheading Holofernes shows the biblical widow Judith cutting off the head of the enemy general Holofernes while her maid Abra pins him to the bed. Artemisia Gentileschi, an Italian painter born in Rome, painted the scene twice. Many viewers read it as her answer to the rape she described in court in 1612, but the first version cannot be dated firmly enough to prove it.
In the Book of Judith, Holofernes besieges her town of Bethulia and seizes its springs. Judith walks into his camp, waits until he falls asleep drunk in his tent, and strikes his neck twice with his own sword. The Bible gives the act a few lines. Gentileschi painted the act itself, with the blade already in the neck.
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The reading starts from a trial. In May 1611, Artemisia said, the painter Agostino Tassi raped her. Her father Orazio, also a painter, brought the charges, and the trial in Rome lasted more than eight months. She told the court what Tassi had done and repeated it under torture.
On May 14, 1612, the judges had the sibille tied around her fingers, cords that tighten on the hand, to test whether she was telling the truth. The record reports her answer as È vero, è vero. "It is true, it is true." We have her words because the scholar Eva Menzio published the trial documents in 1981.
A date that weakens the link
On November 27, 1612, the judge condemned Tassi and gave him a choice between five years of hard labor and banishment from Rome. He chose banishment the next day. What the banishment meant is unclear. The sentence may never have been enforced, or Tassi may have stayed out of Rome only until April 1613.
Artemisia left Rome sooner. She married a Florentine painter on November 29, 1612, and by March 1613 she had a studio in Florence. That matters because the painting so often tied to the trial, the Naples canvas and the first of her two Judiths, is often dated to around 1612, while the trial was still fresh.
The date is a guess. The art historian Francesca Baldassarri ties a payment of July 31, 1617, to the Naples canvas, which would put it five years after the trial. If she is right, Artemisia painted it as a married woman living in Florence, long after the sentence.
The second Judith, much larger, hangs in the Uffizi in Florence and dates to around 1620. A patron ordered it, and I find it hard to call a picture a private revenge when someone paid for it. It can still carry what she lived through, since a painter can draw on it a year later or five years later.
That patron paid late, and Artemisia needed a friend to help her collect.
What You'll Discover
What the Naples canvas can show.
Who paid for the second Judith.
Where Galileo comes in.
What Caravaggio's version leaves out.