Judith and Maidservant with Head of Holofernes

By the 1640s Artemisia Gentileschi was among the most successful painters in Naples, running a busy workshop and shipping commissions across Europe. She returned repeatedly to Judith, the widow who saves her besieged town by beheading the enemy general Holofernes. This is the second of three versions she made of the same moment, just after the killing. The maid pushes the severed head into a bag while Judith turns sharply toward the tent, one hand raised, as if a sound had reached them from the dark. She had first painted the scene in her twenties and would paint it once more, all three sharing nearly the same design across some twenty years.