Judite

For most of its life in Russia this panel was believed to be a Raphael. It came into Catherine the Great's collection in 1772, bought in Paris from the banker Pierre Crozat, and it hung under Raphael's name in the Hermitage for nearly a century before scholars settled on Giorgione, the short-lived Venetian who died young around 1510. The subject is Judith, the widow from the Hebrew Bible who saved her city by beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes. What is striking is how little violence Giorgione allows. She stands calm and almost tender, sword lowered, her bare foot resting on the severed head as if on a step. For a long time you could barely see the setting at all. A cleaning finished in 1971 stripped away yellowed varnish and old repaint, and out of the darkness came a soft landscape behind her, a tower and low hills under an even light.