1600 (ca.), Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Judith Beheading Holofernes (detail) -- Palazzo Barberini (Rome)
From the museum label:
Discovered, almost by chance, in 1950 and acquired by the National Gallery in 1971, the painting was made for the Genoese patrician and banker Ottavio Costa (1554-1639), between the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when Costa was living permanently in Rome.
The canvas depicts Judith's murder of the Assyrian general Holofernes, as recounted in the biblical book dedicated to her (Judith, 13: 9-10). The painter here portrays the crucial moment of this dramatic action, but at the same time he extends its duration, paradoxically representing a suspended and interminable instant.
The gory Caravaggesque representation anticipates what will be an obsession of seventeenth-century painting and theatre, from the rediscovery of Seneca's tragedies to Elizabethan drama: the agony of death.
Link to the full painting.
1600 (ca.), Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Judith Beheading Holofernes (detail) -- Palazzo Barberini (Rome)
From the museum label:
Discovered, almost by chance, in 1950 and acquired by the National Gallery in 1971, the painting was made for the Genoese patrician and banker Ottavio Costa (1554-1639), between the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when Costa was living permanently in Rome.
The canvas depicts Judith's murder of the Assyrian general Holofernes, as recounted in the biblical book dedicated to her (Judith, 13: 9-10). The painter here portrays the crucial moment of this dramatic action, but at the same time he extends its duration, paradoxically representing a suspended and interminable instant.
The gory Caravaggesque representation anticipates what will be an obsession of seventeenth-century painting and theatre, from the rediscovery of Seneca's tragedies to Elizabethan drama: the agony of death.
Link to the full painting.