Judith with the Head of Holofernes

The biblical book of Judith gave painters a heroine and a horror in one scene. Judith, a widow from the besieged Jewish town of Bethulia, went to the tent of the Assyrian general Holofernes, got him drunk, and cut off his head to save her people. Veronese painted this in Venice around 1582, in the last decade of his life, still the city's great master of shimmering colour and rich fabric. At first the eye goes only to Judith, dressed in worldly finery and lit in strong, bright colour, calm, almost reluctant. Only on a second look do you find the dark head of Holofernes and the sack the maidservant holds open to receive it. The dark head and the pale beauty are held in the same quiet moment. The canvas belonged to the great Habsburg collector Archduke Leopold Wilhelm and is recorded in the imperial gallery in Vienna before 1712.