Artemisia Gentileschi – Judith and her Maidservant

Of the five treatments of the Judith and Holofernes story depicted by Artemisia Gentileschi, I have deliberately singled out this one to write about, the one which hangs in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. I think it her best for the way it captures the compassionate complicity and sisterhood existing between heroine and servant, a bond which transcends anything to do with class or rank. The two figures stand close together and in front of one another shown in three-quarter length and in profile, but their collusive exchange of a moment ago has been suddenly diverted elsewhere, causing them each to look over their respective shoulders. Both of them bear a weight. Judith rests a sword over her shoulder almost casually, as familiar with its heft as any man and as if its wielding were an everyday occurrence for her. Her left hand is placed on the right shoulder of her maidservant. Half a head shorter than Judith, this girl holds a basket against her hip containing the recently severed head of Holofernes just as if in other circumstances, she might be carrying a basket of fruit. It is the intimate normality of their stance that shocks when we glance down to the bottom right to see the grey and lifeless head of a man. His remaining blood is shown dripping through the basket, which was to be carried off so dispassionately, just before they became alarmed by something ‘off stage’.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and her Maidservant, c.1616, oil on canvas, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence

Artemesia was not the only artist drawn to the bible story of Holofernes and Judith. Depictions go back to medieval times and appear regularly over subsequent centuries. Caravaggio and Christofano Allori had depicted the beheading story a few years prior to Artemisia’s various takes on the subject and more than a century earlier Mantegna and Botticelli had both painted the decapitation scene while Donatello also did so in bronze, so its depiction was nothing new. But Artemisia seems to have been particularly drawn to the tale, possibly for straightforward psychological reasons given that she had suffered severe mental and physical torment at the hands of a man she trusted after she was violently raped by him in 1611; she may have identified with the heroine in her portrayal as a kind of wish-fulfilment fantasy of revenge. One of the most infamous paintings of her entire oeuvre, made some four or five years earlier, Judith Slaying Holoferenes, is probably the most graphicly blood-spattered in all Renaissance art, a visceral expression of retributive justice.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, c1612, oil on canvas, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

The plot line is enthralling. In short, the Old Testament (or the Apocrypha of the Protestant bible) account relates how Holofernes, an Assyrian army commander, had been laying siege to the Judean city of Bethulia, intent on its destruction. Without food and water, the people there begin to lose their trust in God’s protection, until Judith, the attractive widow of a well-to-do citizen, takes matters into her own hands. She makes her way into the general’s camp and proceeds to flirt with him, feigning betrayal of her people and advising him to sustain the siege so that the people will commit sin by eating special food dedicated for priest-only consumption. This would be a transgression undermining of their morale and resolve, she tells him. At the subsequent banquet, Holofernes begins to lust after his guest but drinks too much and passes out, at which point Judith, with the help of her maid Abra, cuts off his head using his own sword. As the Assyrians, now leaderless, retreat in disarray, Judith is feted by the victors as the heroine who saved not just the city but the entire kingdom, thanks to her steadfast faith in the almighty and her audacious and cold-blooded bravery. Easy to see why for artists this would make for a compelling visual narrative.

As viewers aware of the story, we are able to see Judith and Abra in the painting not as murderers but as having performed an act of justifiable homicide, even if the act and the basket contents shown are almost as shockingly gruesome for us as Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath painted a year of two before Artemisia’s Slaying picture.

In the painting, Judith and Alba stand together in support of one another against the chiaroscuro background of a nighttime setting, willing collaborators in the grisly outrage. Judith’s dress is sumptuously gold-embroidered, her chemise delicately lacy and her elaborate hairdo is piled high and held in place with a jewelled fastener while a pearl earing dangles at the side of her face. We can therefore imagine her appeal to her host in the earlier episode of inebriatedly ineffectual seduction. Her cheeks are flushed, and her lips are parted, doubtless from the breath-taking exertion of just now hacking through a neck, but also from the excited brazenness of the act and from fear of discovery and capture. Holofernes’ sword is as intricately fashioned as Judith’s hair. Its cross-guard is curled, and the end of its pommel is decorated with an open-mouthed death’s head, a symbol of his brutality and a harbinger of his demise. I like the red of Judith’s inner sleeve, a more oblique visual reminder than the earlier Slaying picture of the recently spilled blood.

Abra has her back to us, her head covered with a knotted cloth which hangs down her back and the deep skin folds of her neck gesturing at her alarm as she twists sharply towards its cause. In contrast to her mistress’ darkly opulent dress her own is more rustic and spiral-laced at the sides. Its gold colour not only echoes the trim of Judith’s dress, signalling a visual affinity between them, but also stands for the nobility and glory that the artist invests in the lowly but faithful helpmeet and in the butchery undertaken.  Her sleeves are rolled up, a reminder of the hands-on physicality of the task she has just aided and abetted, and the blood-stained basket cloth has worked loose to uncover the head within and indicates confirmation of the shared responsibility for the deed recently performed.

Judith and her Maidservant is noteworthy as a depiction of a moment from the bible narrative for what it doesn’t portray. This is a portrait principally about women without men, women giving themselves agency, fighting back against the patriarchy and the macho presence of Holofernes is reduced to an inanimate truncation of his former self – and decapitation here could be seen to stand as proxy for castration - the emblem of the general’s virility now in the hands of a woman. Judith’s hand resting on Abra’s shoulder is protective and defensive, as if, armed with the sword, she is hyper-vigilant and ready to continue the fight. She is prepared to sacrifice her own life in order to shield her ‘sister’, her partner and equal in legitimised crime, from violation. For the viewer, although the tension in the scene is almost palpable, and even despite its manifest theatricality, we can’t help but feel moved by Judith’s show of tendresse. With one hand solicitous and the other loyally combative, Judith balances those features of womankind which epitomise the allegorical figure of Justice.