Judith

The Jewish heroine Judith holds the head of the enemy Assyrian commander, Holofernes, whom she decapitated in his drunken sleep. This story is taken from the Book of Judith, an apocryphal text that is not included within the canon of the Hebrew or Christian Biblical tradition. Dressed in a decorative yellow gown with a red and blue cape draped over her shoulder, Judith’s beauty almost distracts the viewer from the darker aspects of this painting: that in one hand, she holds a sword, and in the other, the head of Holofernes. Judith is accompanied by her maid, who assisted in the beheading.  

The story of Judith and Holofernes was a popular subject during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is one of numerous copies after Cristofano Allori's (1577-1621) celebrated original, in which the head of Holofernes is reputedly a self-portrait and the figure of Judith a portrait of Maria de Giovanni Mazzafirri, known as 'La Mazzafirra', who was the artist’s model and former mistress.