Cristofano Allori

Cristofano Allori's most famous painting is a revenge portrait disguised as a Bible scene. His Judith with the Head of Holofernes, painted in Florence around 1613, shows the heroine calmly holding the severed head of the general she has just killed. According to Allori's early biographer Filippo Baldinucci, the figures are portraits. Judith is Maria di Giovanni Mazzafirri, the painter's former mistress known as La Mazzafirra, the old servant beside her is her mother, and the head hanging from Judith's hand is Allori himself.

The story goes that the affair had ended badly, and that the painter cast himself as the man beheaded by the woman who left him. Whether or not every detail is true, his contemporaries clearly read the picture that way, and Allori made several versions because collectors kept asking for it.

He was the son of the painter Alessandro Allori and worked for the Medici court in Florence, known for a polished, jewel-like finish that set him a little apart from the harsher Mannerism around him. He was a slow, fastidious worker and a famously difficult, extravagant man, often in debt. He died in 1621, only in his mid-40s, his output small but the Judith copied and admired for centuries after.