Judite e a criada com a cabeça de Holofernes

Gentileschi painted this around 1623, and she chose not the killing but the dangerous minute afterward. Judith has cut off the head of the enemy general Holofernes in his tent, and now she and her servant are trying to get out of the camp alive. The servant bends to bundle the head into a sack while Judith freezes, one hand thrown up as if she has heard something in the dark. The only light is a single candle on the table. Judith's raised hand blocks its glare and throws a hard shadow up across her own face, the kind of hidden, dramatic light source that Caravaggio had made famous in Italian painting just a few years before.