Giuditta al banchetto di Oloferne

For a long time nobody knew who this woman was. When Rembrandt signed and dated it in 1634, the year he married Saskia, the picture drifted through inventories as a Sophonisba, an Artemisia, just some queen weighed down with pearls. The clue that settled it is the small, watchful old woman at the edge holding an open sack. That sack is where the severed head of the enemy general Holofernes is meant to go, which makes the young woman in her finery the biblical Judith, dressed to disarm a man before she kills him in his tent. Rembrandt gives her none of the violence yet, only the feast and the waiting. He was 28, freshly arrived in Amsterdam, and the model for that gleaming skin and heavy fabric was almost certainly Saskia herself.