Judith with the Head of Holofernes

Set starkly in the foreground, in a closeup view seen from below, the scene is dominated by the presence of a young woman who, her detached expression belying her horrific burden, holds a sword and a large metal basin containing a severed head. On the left, two disturbing male figures, standing out against a vast sky in which clouds hang over gaunt trees and sparse vegetation, direct their gaze not at the main scene but at something happening “off stage” outside the frame.
The intriguing subject drew Erwin Panofsky’s (1962) attention on account of the conflicting elements it contains. The presence of the basin suggests identifying the lady portrayed as Salome, while the presence of the sword points to Judith. According to the tale in the Gospels of St. Mark (Mk 6:17-28) and St. Matthew (Mt 14:3-11), Salome was the daughter of King Herod Antipas’s concubine Herodias, whom John the Baptist had publicly shamed for her immoral conduct. Prompted by her mother, the young girl sought the Baptist’s head as the reward for a dance she had performed at a banquet in honour of Herod. As Panofsky points out, this iconography does not follow the Old and New Testaments to a tee, because Salome did not personally behead the Baptist. While Judith, to whom an entire book in the Bible is devoted, first seduced then beheaded Holofernes, a general under Nebuchadnezzar II and the commander of the Babylonian troops besieging her city of Bethulia. According to traditional iconography, Judith, with the assistance of her ageing maidservant Abra, placed her macabre trophy not in a metal basin but in a canvas bag or a wickerwork basket.
However, while we know of no depictions of Salome with a sword, we do know of several portrayals of Judith, mostly from German-speaking areas and northern Italy, in which Holofernes’ head rests in a basin: they include 16th and 17th century versions of Judith by the circle of Girolamo Romanino (whereabouts unknown; Fototeca Zeri, no. 43265), by Fede Galizia (Rome, Galleria Borghese, inv. 165) and by the workshop of Padovanino (antique market; Fototeca Zeri, no. 57674).
The picture’s authorship was also a matter of debate for a long time, being attributed to different schools and different eras. Initially displayed in the Pinacoteca as likely to have been painted by Giovan Battista Tiepolo (see Messeri, Calzi 1909), it was subsequently attributed to a German artist named Johann Liss in the middle period of his time in Venice, where he travelled c. 1620 after initially training in his native Germany, Flanders and the Low Countries (Colasanti 1921). Longhi, in his youth, attributed it (1922, p. 510) “to some northern European painter akin to Liss with echoes of Cornelius of Haarlem”. Giuseppe Fiocco, writing in 1929, was the first to put forward the name of Francesco Maffei, an attribution accepted by Panofsky in 1962 but subsequently set aside in favour of Liss once again, then of Giulio Carpioni and of the Genoese painter Bernardo Strozzi (Golfieri, in Golfieri, Archi, 1964).
The picture was authoritatively restored to Maffei by Paola Rossi (1991) in her critical reconstruction of the painter’s catalogue and dated to some time between the late 1640s and early ‘50s. In those years Maffei produced a number of paintings akin to this one, for instance his theatrical Apparition of the Virgin to St. Philip Neri in the Gallerie dell’Accademia (inv. 657), possibly from the church of the Incurabili in Venice, and his sensual St. Cecilia with Angel Musicians now in a private collection, which shares with this Judith the same ‘close-up’ composition and a similarly textural handling of paint. Thus this is one of the most interesting products of the artist’s maturity, revealing the stylistic influence of some of the names to whom it has been attributed in the past, for example Strozzi’s vibrant palette, a certain propensity for the grotesque in Carpioni, or above all, the throbbingly textural style of Johan Liss. The work of Paolo Veronese, one of Venetian 16th century painting’s leading lights and a constant lodestar for Maffei, is also echoed in the picture’s clear, springlike atmosphere, the woman’s glowing beauty and the wide-open landscape.
One is struck by the quality of this enigmatic painting, which belonged to the celebrated Faenza photographer Leonida Caldesi (1822–91), who emigrated successfully to London where he worked for Queen Victoria. The quality shines through in the rhythmic articulation of the slender fingers, the subtle gleam of light on the surfaces of the metal basin and the sword hilt, the compact handling of the flesh of the heroine’s glowing face standing out against the dark ground on the left, and her commoner’s features softened by a dangling earring and by the elegant way her hair is gathered back, charmingly leaving a lock loose. Holofernes’ conventional features rule out the possibility of its being a portrait, but Judith’s highly individualised features are unquestionably those of one of the models employed in the workshop of this painter whose artistic stature was already recognised by his contemporary Marco Boschini, writing in 1660: “De Francesco Mafei, quel che a Vicenza/ Splendor acresce con le so’ virtù,/ Per rason giusta debo dir de lù:/ Che l’è Pitor nò da Pigmei, ma da ziganti:/ Mistro, che in quatro sole penelae/ Fà, che ogn’un tegna le cegie inarcae;/ Manieron che stupir fà tuti quanti” ¹ .