Judith avec la tête d'Holopherne

Titian painted this Judith around 1570, when he was well into his eighties and working in a style so loose and broken that some contemporaries wondered whether his eyes or his hands were failing. Judith is the widow from the Hebrew scriptures who saved her besieged town by beheading the enemy general Holofernes in his tent. Titian gives her a calm, almost tender face and sets the severed head low in shadow, and he departs from the usual cast by replacing the old serving woman with a young page at her side. Up close the paint is dragged and dabbed rather than smoothly finished, the manner of his last decade that later painters came to prize. The canvas was bought by Edsel Ford in 1935 and given to the Detroit museum that same year.