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.