Judith décapitant Holopherne

This is among Caravaggio's earliest attempts at a full dramatic scene, painted around 1598 to 1599 for a Genoese banker, Ottavio Costa. Costa prized it so much that he kept it behind a silk curtain and left orders in his will that it must never leave the family. The story is from the Bible. Judith slips into the enemy general's tent and cuts off his head to save her town. What Caravaggio does with it is unsettling. Judith is young and hesitant, brow furrowed, leaning back even as she saws through the neck, as if she cannot quite believe what her own hands are doing. Beside her an old servant waits with a cloth, hard-faced and ready. Holofernes is still alive in the instant shown, mouth open, and the blood jets in straight lines that Caravaggio may well have studied from real executions in Rome.