Judith and Holofernes

In the 1580s Veronese, running one of the busiest workshops in Venice, took on a set of large canvases of Old Testament heroines, and this Judith belongs with them. The story was a favourite in the city. Judith, a widow from a besieged Jewish town, goes to the tent of the enemy general Holofernes, gets him drunk, and beheads him in his sleep to save her people. Veronese stages it like theatre, under heavy draperies pulled back like a curtain, with the general slumped and powerless at the left, Judith calm at the centre, and her old servant waiting with a sack at the right. Parts are clearly by his assistants, though the grand design is his. The canvas was sent to the museum in Caen in 1811, one of the works the French state handed out to provincial collections in those years.