Judith with her servant

In the 1480s Florentine painters came home from Rome with sketchbooks full of ancient sculpture, and one kept in Ghirlandaio's workshop survives, known as the Codex Escurialensis after the Spanish library that now owns it. This small panel wears that Roman habit on its walls. The large relief behind Judith, a battle of horsemen, closely resembles a Roman frieze built into the Arch of Constantine. The one behind her servant shows a sea centaur carrying a woman, a design drawn in that sketchbook, and here the centaur holds up a little tablet with the date in Roman numerals. Its last figures are too worn to read for certain, so the panel falls between 1487 and 1489. The servant, striding in with the head of Holofernes in a basket on her own head, has a near mirror twin in the fresco of the Birth of John the Baptist that Ghirlandaio was painting in those same years in Santa Maria Novella.