Caravaggio's Judith

Judith is a beautiful but troubled young woman. She is engaged in something rather nasty, but God approves, more or less: the light says so.

The subject of this painting proves an excellent study for Caravaggio: the gory extremes suited his emergent mature style. Judith Beheading Holofernes is dated, according to my art book, at 1598, and the figures in the painting present in greater detail than those from some of Caravaggio's earlier works, the features more precisely rendered. The sensual boys of earlier paintings boasted little in the way of wrinkles, their frowns more pouty than anything else, their signature look one of indolence and the ennui that is born of it. Judith is lush, no doubt, and just as sensual, but what makes her alive--more so to me than the musicians of the earlier works--is the frown, the wrinkle of worry that troubles her brow, the upper lip slightly pulled back in distaste. These temporary blemishes in an otherwise blandly perfect face reveal a different kind of study: a figure engaged in process. Something is happening here.

The Sick Bacchus presents a touchstone for the study of Judith. The Sick Bacchus speaks of earthly discomfort, a clear sense of unease emanating from his expression, but he is posed, almost self-consciously so. Judith, by contrast, is in the midst of action. This Bacchus holds the bunch of grapes as though he does not know what to do with them, almost as though Caravaggio were trying to capture not Bacchus himself but rather the model posed as Bacchus--it's almost a meta-painting, from this perspective. What on earth do you expect me to do with these grapes? The question seems to weigh on the Bacchus model like an existential burden. The displeasure in the Bacchus model's expression seems as though it were a response to the situation he finds himself in: I'm sick of you, Caravaggio, and your relentless looking at me, and I just want you to leave me alone. The fact that some scholars believe the Sick Bacchus to be a self-portrait complicates but does not fully undermine this reading of the painting. Who can say that Caravaggio himself -- a licentious, easily provoked brawler with a sensitive heart, it would seem -- was not sick of himself?



Judith Beheading Holofernes takes the unease that defines the Sick Bacchus and adds further dimensions to it. If Sick Bacchus is autobiographical, Judith represents the exploration of the consciousness of the other. Judith, engaged in some dirty work, is in recoil, distancing herself from the action that her hands are accomplishing. In the midst of her righteous killing, the heroine grips her sword with a kind of awkwardness similar to that with which Bacchus holds his grapes. Judith holds the sword in her right hand, at the furthest remove from her body, as though she were merely in the act of dropping something repulsive and not as though she were in the midst of using this weapon to remove the head of a man who is still somehow (with half his head sawed off) fully alive, twisting his body around in the final moment before that vitality is extinguished. Judith is, despite the intensity of Holofernes' writhing, the clear subject of the painting: to her belongs the key action, the key movement. In the left hand, she holds the half-severed head at arm's length as well, though she does not seem nearly as uncomfortable with the head as she does with the sword.

Even at a glance, it is easy to see that the physics of motion do not seem to agree here; the details do not match up. We may never have witnessed a beheading ourselves, but we can extrapolate from our experiences of the physical world, and something does not seem right. It does not seem possible that the gentle sawing motion we seem to be seeing with the sword, like slicing into a roast chicken, could result in a beheading. Nor does the expression on Judith's face seem to possess the resolve, the fortitude, the emotional intensity required for her to commit such an act as the one she is presumably dedicating herself, body and soul, to committing. Perhaps Caravaggio--famous for pulling his models in off the streets, his Madonnas famously identified as real-life common prostitutes--took a kitchen girl for his model; it is as though he captured her in the act of pulling a drowned mouse from a pan of dirty dishwater. Imagine such a moment, and you have the look on Judith's face.

There are other things at work here--most noteably, most disconcertingly, and most bafflingly--the erotic undertone of the painting. Despite the look of distaste, of concern, on Judith's face, her nipples are unmistakeably erect beneath her thin, white blouse. Before you accuse me of perversion, take a look at the painting: even with a casual glance, the truth of what I say is clear as day. Even with a frown and her hair pulled back (she is in action mode, after all), Judith is not only a figure of beauty but also one with a clear sexual charge. Her beauty is not of the radiant, otherworldly kind, but of the here and now. Is Caravaggio trying to relay some kind of message about gender roles and sexuality? If so, that message is uncertain, and I don't think any other Caravaggios clarify the matter any. Maybe the idea is to establish a connection between violence and sex, two extremes of passionate action--but then again, the look on Judith's face is hardly one of passion. Rather, it is one of fulfilling a nasty obligation.

In case we doubt the kind of beauty Judith personifies, though, we have the old crone who stands beside her. Her ugliness is, beyond the effects of age, a true ugliness, born of the grotesque; it is just as physical, just as sensual (along the lines of evoking the sensory experience of the body) as Judith's beauty. The old woman stands rigid beside Judith, a bag in hand, ready to take the head of Holofernes before it drops. The contrast is not merely between youth and age, between the beautiful and the grotesque, but primarily between two opposing attitudes to what takes place in this scene: the old woman is eager, hard-eyed: that son-of-a-bitch has been a long time deserving his come-uppance. She is ready to take the head, although Judith is reluctant (but willing) to oblige in the preliminary beheading that is necessary for that to happen. Perhaps this is part of the definition of a hero, Caravaggio is saying: a hero (or heroine) engages in violence reluctantly, out of necessity, but a hero does what a hero has to do; the commoner searching roughly for justice just wants to take heads. Caravaggio himself, it seems, based on the police reports, tended toward the latter mode of behavior.

In short, there is much here that complicates Judith's act of heroism, such a mingling of various elements that they cannot be resolved. This painting is definitively imperfect, then, because of the awkwardness of these unresolved dimensions of meaning, but such imperfection seems to be precisely the point when it comes to Caravaggio, who painted human beings as he saw them, dirty fingernails and all. Somehow, though, despite the incongruity of Judith's expression and other near absurdities, this painting is as compelling as anything I have ever seen. Every time I open the art book, it is the scene that I end up resting on after flipping through many other pages, and it is the image to which I compare other works. To me, there is art before this painting, and there is art after this painting. I don't exactly know what the painter was up to, and I don't exactly want to know. There are, after all, some matters that even the light of truth leaves willfully obscure.

On the Late Christopher Hitchens' Atheism

Over the years, I have read his articles with both admiration and outrage, usually depending on the subject, but I have to admit that the admiration won out in the end. Of all the defenders of recent political policies that I have vehemently disagreed with, he is perhaps the only one I respect.

I expected plenty of appreciations to appear upon Christopher Hitchens' death, but it is with some incredulousness that I read Ross Douthat's piece on Hitchens in today's New York Times. It's not the fact that Douthat wrote such an appreciation -- it was almost expected -- but rather the audacity and anti-Hitchensian quality of what he had to say, which appeared in the guise of a tribute.

Douthat is in many ways the anti-Hitchens. Hitchens' cynicism was hard purchased over the years. Douthat's cynicism seems to serve one purpose only, which is to further his conservative agenda. Hitchens was not afraid to break with the party line--he saw what he saw.  Douthat always seems to see what he wants to see in a case. I have little respect for him as a writer or as a thinker.

Douthat's column on Hitchens explores the affinity that, according to Douthat, so many religious believers had for the devout atheist and self-declared Enemy of God. Without propounding any counter-theories of my own, I will say that it appears that Douthat is trying to claim Hitchens as one of his own, to make a holy pagan out of him, like Aquinas did with Aristotle -- a "Believer's Atheist," as the title of the column suggests.

Hitchens is reputed to be the kind of gregarious fellow who would sit down to a drink with his worst enemy, Mother Theresa, for instance. I don't know how he would feel at being labelled a "Believer's Atheist," but I suspect that the man who so adamantly and publicly refused requests from religious-minded individuals for a deathbed conversion during his long and public struggle with cancer might have taken issue with the epithet. What Douthat ends up claiming is a misreading of atheism -- Hitchensonian as well as the other varieties. Here's what he said at the end of his piece:

When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.

Atheist intellectuals of the Hitchens variety rarely talk about atheism as a font of despair. They are generally at peace with the world, with the universe, when they talk about their beliefs. The "wasting shadow" here is not Hitchens' or any other contemporary atheist intellectual's, for that matter -- it is Douthat's, because he is too limited in his worldview to appreciate the fact that people can lead fulfilling lives, even lives absent of despair and existential angst, without a belief in the afterlife. Thus, to say that Hitchens was not the kind of man to give in to despair is not to say that he was a man whose beliefs were all that similar to those of the believers. What we see here is Douthat's inflexible inability to inhabit the perspective of someone like Hitchens -- of someone with beliefs counter to his own.

Agnostics, also, such as this writer, can live content with mystery and uncertainty. I don't know what to expect after I die. I don't expect much, but I will be satisfied with whatever I get, and in the meantime I will focus on doing what little good I can in this world and trying the best I can to extract meaning from my experiences and from those of others. As for the "Marxist fairy tales" and "techno-utopian happy talk," I can only conjecture as to what Douthat might mean. I suspect he's just getting a stab at some enemies while he has the chance.

Douthat ends his column thusly, imediately following the previous quotation:

My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why.

That "why" is why it's "completely wrong to give in to despair." Can there be no other reason besides God and the afterlife? Is a belief in humankind, the universe, and electro-magnetism not enough?

As we have seen before, when Hitchens first publicly announced that he had terminal cancer, we see here the believer's desperate hopes for the non-believer. It's a nice sentiment, I suppose, but it misses the mark because it refuses to demonstrate a decent respect for the non-believer's beliefs.