Judith with the Head of Holofernes. 17th century

LATE MANNERIST SCHOOL OF FONTENBLEAU (ENTOURAGE OF TOUISSANT DUBREUIL 1561-1602 ), JUDITH WITH THE HEAD OF HOLOFERNES (oil on canvas)

The oil on canvas we present depicts one of the most famous female iconographic subjects from Old Testament literature: the brave Jewish woman Judith carrying the head of the Assyrian general Holofernes after having beheaded him.

The episode is inspired by the Old Testament writing, which takes its name from the heroine of the same name: Book of Judith 13: 8-11. More precisely, the subject of the painting constitutes the dramatic epilogue of a story of female plots, which, during the siege of the city of Bethulia by the Assyrian army of King Nebuchadnezzar, narrates the exploits of the Jewish widow Judith who first unsheaths the feminine weapon of seduction to make the enemy general Holofernes fall in love with her, cleverly plotting behind his back until she beheads him by taking advantage of his state of drunkenness during a banquet.

Thanks to the deception perpetrated against her enemy in love, Judith becomes a symbol and prototype of female cunning over the invader's arrogance thanks to her bewitching work of seduction.

Although the subject we are talking about achieved undisputed fame and notoriety in the seventeenth century thanks to the genius of Caravaggio, who "consecrated" it with the well-known painting kept in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini to the point of establishing itself as a true artistic "mystery" tableau that has hit the headlines in recent weeks due to the quarrel concerning a presumed example of an autographed Caravaggio found in an attic in the French city of Toulouse, it is an incontrovertible fact that our subject represents the most attractive thing the art market can continue to offer for amateurs and collectors, due to an intrinsic sense of pathos that constitutes the very supporting structure of the episode as well as the lifeblood of every pictorial representation of the genre, what makes our painting interesting is its chronological placement, which takes it back to an artistic phase preceding the Caravaggio lesson: Mannerism.

The sober and composite figurative elegance, the luminosity and the colouring, combined with a certain stylization of the face and anatomy, allow us to place the painting in the early seventeenth century and, even better, to consider it a genuine result of late French Mannerism attributable to the entourage of Touissant Dubreuil (Paris 1561-1602), one of the epigones of the well-known school of Fontenbleau, often evoked for the play of reciprocal influences and suggestions with Florentine Mannerism.

Open to the tendencies of Primaticcio and Nicolò dell'Abate, Dubrueil, who was also the court painter of Henry IV, shows his adherence to the metaphysical instances of Mannerism in “Sacrifice and Awakening of a Lady” (castle of Saint Germain en Laye), but above all in “Angelica and Medoro”, in which he definitively made the new style his own.

What Caravaggio will make a “workhorse” on the centrality of pathos destined to express iconically the dangerous oxymoron eros-thanatos in all its seductive crudeness for followers and admirers, from Artemisia Gentileschi (Florence, Uffizi and Naples, Capodimonte Gallery) to the Tuscan Cristofano Allori (Florence, Uffizi), is expressed in our canvas through the language of intellectual sublimation typical of Mannerism, which transcends pathos through the entirely cerebral virtuosity entrusted to colour.

The absence of the old servant next to Judith, who instead constitutes an essential iconographic element even in the previous examples by Botticelli and Mantegna isolates our heroine in all her self-referentiality, almost as if she wanted to remove the event from its historical and contingent dimension, with all the crudeness that overflows in other versions, to make her a “Circe” who, with her fixed gaze in the foreground, captures the spectator, almost as if she wanted to question him with respectful provocation on the boundaries of the art of female seduction, leaving to the imagination the crudest, most macabre and repellent things that are not exhibited in the canvas.

In addition to the acclaimed iconographic success of the subject, the attribution to the singular late-Mannerist school of painting, the not insignificant dimensions of the canvas (133 x 100 with frame) and the state of conservation contribute to increasing its appeal.