Judith and her Servant with the Head of Holofernes

Around 1610 Rome was still living in Caravaggio's shadow. He had fled the city four years earlier and died that summer, but his dark, candle-lit naturalism was the language every ambitious painter now spoke. This Judith belongs to that moment. It shows the aftermath of the killing: Judith of Bethulia and her servant Abra with the severed head of Holofernes, the Assyrian general whose army she had come to stop. Who actually painted it is still argued. The picture was long given to Orazio Gentileschi and dated to about 1608. Today it is often catalogued under his daughter Artemisia, who was learning the craft as a teenager in her father's workshop, barred like all women from the academies. Whose hand shaped this canvas, the father's or the daughter's, is a question the specialists have not settled.