홀로페르네스의 목을 베는 유디트

Artemisia Gentileschi painted this around 1612 and 1613, in the same stretch of years her father dragged the painter Agostino Tassi into a Roman court for raping her. During that trial she was questioned under torture, her fingers squeezed with cords to test whether she was telling the truth. Then she painted this. Judith, a widow from the Book of Judith, has climbed onto the bed of the enemy general Holofernes and is sawing through his neck while her maidservant pins him down. What's unusual is the effort in it. The two women brace and strain like they're doing hard physical work, the blood runs in straight jets down the white sheet, and Holofernes is still awake and fighting. Generations of viewers have read her own ordeal into those two determined faces, though she never said so herself. She painted a second, larger version of the same scene a few years later, now in Florence.