Giuditta e Oloferne

Goya never meant this for anyone to buy. In 1819 he bought a house outside Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo, and painted directly onto its plaster walls a set of dark, private murals we now call the Black Paintings. This was one of them. It shows the biblical widow Judith, who saved her people by getting the enemy general Holofernes drunk and beheading him. Judith stands with the blade raised, an old servant hunched in prayer beside her, and the victim lost in the shadow below. Goya was in his seventies, deaf, and had lived through war, plague, and political terror. Decades after his death the murals were peeled from the walls and mounted on canvas, which is how this one survived to reach the Prado.