Young Sick Bacchus
The Young Sick Bacchus known as the Sick Bacchus or the Self-Portrait as Bacchus, is an early self-portrait by the Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, dated between 1593 and 1594. It now hangs in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. According to Caravaggio's first biographer, Giovanni Baglione, it was a cabinet piece painted by the artist using a mirror; the painting dates from Caravaggio's first years in Rome following his arrival from his native Milan in mid-1592. Sources for this period are inconclusive and inaccurate, but they agree that at one point the artist fell ill and spent six months in the hospital of Santa Maria della Consolazione. According to a 2009 article in the American medical publication Clinical Infectious Diseases, the painting indicates that Caravaggio's physical ailment involved malaria, as the jaundiced appearance of the skin and the icterus in the eyes are indications of some active hepatic disease causing high levels of bilirubin; the Sick Bacchus was among the many works making up the collection of Giuseppe Cesari, one of Caravaggio's early employers, seized by the art-collector Cardinal-Nephew Scipione Borghese in 1607, together with the Boy Peeling Fruit and Boy with a Basket of Fruit.
Apart from its assumed autobiographical content, this early painting was used by Caravaggio to market himself, demonstrating his virtuosity in painting genres such as still-life and portraits and hinting at the ability to paint the classical figures of antiquity. The three-quarters angle of the face was among those preferred for late renaissance portraiture, but what is striking is the grimace and tilt of the head, the real sense of the suffering; the still-life can be compared with that contained in later works such as the Boy With a Basket of Fruit and the Boy Bitten by a Lizard where the fruits are in a much better condition, reflecting no doubt Caravaggio's improved condition, both physically and mentally. The painting shows the influence of his teacher, the Bergamasque Simone Peterzano, in the utilization of the tensed musculature depiction, of the austere Lombard school style in its attention to realistic details. Cindy Sherman, as part of her History Portrait series, produced a parody on Sick Bacchus, an ironic photographic self-portrait named Untitled # 224.
During a 2018 NPR interview, Paul Janeway of the band St. Paul & the Broken Bones said that the title of his band's new album, Young Sick Camellia, is an homage to Caravaggio's Young Sick Bacchus. Chronology of works by Caravaggio
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the United States. With 6,953,927 visitors to its three locations in 2018, it was the third most visited art museum in the world, its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among seventeen curatorial departments. The main building, on the eastern edge of Central Park along Museum Mile in Manhattan's Upper East Side is by area one of the world's largest art galleries. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art and artifacts from Medieval Europe. On March 18, 2016, the museum opened the Met Breuer museum at Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side; the permanent collection consists of works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Oceanian and Islamic art.
The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments and accessories, as well as antique weapons and armor from around the world. Several notable interiors, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are installed in its galleries; the Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 for the purposes of opening a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. It opened on February 20, 1872, was located at 681 Fifth Avenue; the Met's permanent collection is curated by seventeen separate departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as six dedicated conservation departments and a Department of Scientific Research. The permanent collection includes works of art from classical antiquity and ancient Egypt and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, an extensive collection of American and modern art; the Met maintains extensive holdings of African, Oceanian and Islamic art. The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments and accessories, antique weapons and armor from around the world.
A great number of period rooms, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met's galleries. In addition to its permanent exhibitions, the Met organizes and hosts large traveling shows throughout the year; the current chairman of the board, Daniel Brodsky, was elected in 2011 and became chairman three years after director Philippe de Montebello retired at the end of 2008. On March 1, 2017, the BBC reported that Daniel Weiss, the Met's president and COO, would temporarily act as CEO for the museum. Following the departure of Thomas P. Campbell as the Met's director and CEO on June 30, 2017, the search for a new director of the museum was assigned to the human resources firm Phillips Oppenheim to present a new candidate for the position "by the end of the fiscal year in June" of 2018; the next director will report to Weiss as the current president of the museum. In April 2018, Max Hollein was named director. Beginning in the late 19th century, the Met started acquiring ancient art and artifacts from the Near East.
From a few cuneiform tablets and seals, the Met's collection of Near Eastern art has grown to more than 7,000 pieces. Representing a history of the region beginning in the Neolithic Period and encompassing the fall of the Sasanian Empire and the end of Late Antiquity, the collection includes works from the Sumerian, Sasanian, Assyrian and Elamite cultures, as well as an extensive collection of unique Bronze Age objects; the highlights of the collection include a set of monumental stone lamassu, or guardian figures, from the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II. Though the Met first acquired a group of Peruvian antiquities in 1882, the museum did not begin a concerted effort to collect works from Africa and the Americas until 1969, when American businessman and philanthropist Nelson A. Rockefeller donated his more than 3,000-piece collection to the museum. Today, the Met's collection contains more than 11,000 pieces from sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, the Americas and is housed in the 40,000-square-foot Rockefeller Wing on the south end of the museum.
The collection ranges from 40,000-year-old indigenous Australian rock paintings, to a group of 15-foot-tall memorial poles carved by the Asmat people of New Guinea, to a priceless collection of ceremonial and personal objects from the Nigerian Court of Benin donated by Klaus Perls. The range of materials represented in the Africa and Americas collection is undoubtedly the widest of any department at the Met, including everything from precious metals to porcupine quills; the Met's Asian department holds a collection of Asian art, of more than 35,000 pieces, arguably the most comprehensive in the US. The collection dates back to the founding of the museum: many of the philanthropists who made the earliest gifts to the museum included Asian art in their collections. Today, an entire wing of the museum is dedicated to the Asian collection, spans 4,000 years of Asian art; every Asian civilization is represented in the Met's Asian department, the pieces on display include every type of decorative art, from painting and printmaking to sculpture and metalworking.
The department is well known for its comprehensive collection of Chinese calligraphy and painting, as well as for its Indian sculptures and Tibetan works, the arts of Burma and Thailand. All three ancient religions of India – Hinduism and Jainism – are well represented in these s
Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Caravaggio)
Rest on the Flight into Egypt is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, like the Flight into Egypt, was a popular subject in art, but Caravaggio's composition, with an angel playing the viol to the Holy Family, is unusual; the scene is based not on any incident in the Bible itself, but on a body of tales or legends that had grown up in the early Middle Ages around the Bible story of the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt for refuge on being warned that Herod the Great was seeking to kill the Christ Child. According to the legend and Mary paused on the flight in a grove of trees; this basic story acquired many extra details during the centuries. Caravaggio shows Mary asleep with the infant Jesus, while Joseph holds a manuscript for an angel, playing a hymn to Mary on the viol; the date of the painting is disputed. According to Caravaggio's contemporary Giulio Mancini, this painting and the Penitent Magdalene, together with an unidentified painting of Saint John the Evangelist, was done while Caravaggio was staying with Monsignor Fantino Petrignani, shortly after leaving the workshop of Giuseppe Cesari.
This happened in January 1594. However, there are problems with accepting Mancini's statement. To begin, none of these three works were listed in Petragnani's inventory of 1600, although it is possible that they could have been painted for another patron. More the painting has an obvious and direct compositional source in Annibale Carracci's Judgement of Hercules, completed early in 1596 and admired: the pose of Caravaggio's angel, for example, is based on that of Carracci's figure of Vice. While John Gash accepts Mancini's testimony, including Peter Robb and Helen Langdon, have raised the possibility that it was painted for Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, who made Caravaggio in effect his household artist from about 1595 or 1596; the sophisticated treatment is appropriate for the cardinal's intellectual tastes and interests, it is unlikely that the artist would embark on a work like this other than as a direct commission. This was the first large-scale work done by Caravaggio, is compositionally more ambitious and more successful than The Musicians, of about 1595.
It is one of the rare landscapes from this artist who seems always to have been painting in a prison cell, a room at a tavern, or at night - one critic has joked that all the sky in all Caravaggio's 80-odd works would add up to a few square centimeters of paint. The painting was sold to the Pamphilj by the early 17th century. Caravaggio's Lombard and Venetian heritage are evident in the treatment of the landscape and in the luminous tonalities. Like most depictions of the flight to Egypt this is a peaceful moment, one in which the scenery is to be enjoyed, more gardenscape than landscape; the luminous figure of the adolescent angel, at once serene and sensuous, holds the centre of the group. The mother and child grouping, one of many that Caravaggio would paint, is comparable in its delicacy and realism to the best that the thousands in the canon can offer. One of the great pastimes of Caravaggio scholars is identifying his models. Much progress has been made, but the following should be regarded as tentative only, as Caravaggio left few clues.
Mary appears to be the same girl who appears as Mary Magdalen in the Penitent Magdalene of about 1597 in the Doria-Pamphilj Gallery. The aged Joseph appears similar to the elderly saints in The Inspiration of Saint Matthew of 1602 and, less Saint Jerome in Meditation of about 1605; some critics have identified the boy-angel with the ingenuous victim of cheats on the left of Cardsharps, while others have seen a similarity with the profile of the boy cheating him instead. Gash, John. Caravaggio. ISBN 1-904449-22-0. Hibbard, Howard. Caravaggio. Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-430128-1. Langdon, Helen. Caravaggio: A Life. ISBN 0-374-11894-9. Robb, Peter. M. ISBN 0-312-27474-2. Media related to Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Caravaggio at Wikimedia Commons
Louvre
The Louvre, or the Louvre Museum, is the world's largest art museum and a historic monument in Paris, France. A central landmark of the city, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement. 38,000 objects from prehistory to the 21st century are exhibited over an area of 72,735 square metres. In 2018, the Louvre was the world's most visited art museum; the museum is housed in the Louvre Palace built as the Louvre castle in the late 12th to 13th century under Philip II. Remnants of the fortress are visible in the basement of the museum. Due to the urban expansion of the city, the fortress lost its defensive function and, in 1546, was converted by Francis I into the main residence of the French Kings; the building was extended many times to form the present Louvre Palace. In 1682, Louis XIV chose the Palace of Versailles for his household, leaving the Louvre as a place to display the royal collection, from 1692, a collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. In 1692, the building was occupied by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which in 1699 held the first of a series of salons.
The Académie remained at the Louvre for 100 years. During the French Revolution, the National Assembly decreed that the Louvre should be used as a museum to display the nation's masterpieces; the museum opened on 10 August 1793 with an exhibition of 537 paintings, the majority of the works being royal and confiscated church property. Because of structural problems with the building, the museum was closed in 1796 until 1801; the collection was increased under Napoleon and the museum was renamed Musée Napoléon, but after Napoleon's abdication many works seized by his armies were returned to their original owners. The collection was further increased during the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X, during the Second French Empire the museum gained 20,000 pieces. Holdings have grown through donations and bequests since the Third Republic; the collection is divided among eight curatorial departments: Egyptian Antiquities. The Louvre Palace, which houses the museum, was begun as a fortress by Philip II in the 12th century to protect the city from English soldiers which were in Normandy.
Remnants of this castle are still visible in the crypt. Whether this was the first building on that spot is not known. According to the authoritative Grand Larousse encyclopédique, the name derives from an association with wolf hunting den. In the 7th century, St. Fare, an abbess in Meaux, left part of her "Villa called Luvra situated in the region of Paris" to a monastery.. The Louvre Palace was altered throughout the Middle Ages. In the 14th century, Charles V converted the building into a residence and in 1546, Francis I renovated the site in French Renaissance style. Francis acquired what would become the nucleus of the Louvre's holdings, his acquisitions including Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. After Louis XIV chose Versailles as his residence in 1682, constructions slowed. Four generations of Boulle were granted Royal patronage and resided in the Louvre in the following order: Pierre Boulle, Jean Boulle, Andre-Charles Boulle and his four sons, after him. André-Charles Boulle is the most famous French cabinetmaker and the preeminent artist in the field of marquetry known as "Inlay".
Boulle was "the most remarkable of all French cabinetmakers". He was commended to Louis XIV of France, the "Sun King", by Jean-Baptiste Colbert as being "the most skilled craftsman in his profession". Before the fire of 1720 destroyed them, André-Charles Boulle held priceless works of art in the Louvre, including forty-eight drawings by Raphael'. By the mid-18th century there were an increasing number of proposals to create a public gallery, with the art critic La Font de Saint-Yenne publishing, in 1747, a call for a display of the royal collection. On 14 October 1750, Louis XV agreed and sanctioned a display of 96 pieces from the royal collection, mounted in the Galerie royale de peinture of the Luxembourg Palace. A hall was opened by Le Normant de Tournehem and the Marquis de Marigny for public viewing of the Tableaux du Roy on Wednesdays and Saturdays, contained Andrea del Sarto's Charity and works by Raphael. Under Louis XVI, the royal museum idea became policy; the comte d'Angiviller broadened the collection and in 1776 proposed conversion of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre – which contained maps – into the "French Museum".
Many proposals were offered for the Louvre's renovation into a museum. Hence the museum remained incomplete until the French Revolution. During the French Revolution the Louvre was transformed into a public museum. In May 1791, the Assembly declared that the Louvre would be "a place for bringing together monuments of all the sciences and arts". On 10 August 1792, Louis XVI was imprisoned and the royal collection i
Martha and Mary Magdalene (Caravaggio)
Martha and Mary Magdalene is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It is in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Alternate titles include Martha Reproving Mary, The Conversion of the Magdalene, the Alzaga Caravaggio. Caravaggio's Martha and Mary is dated to 1598–99, when he was in the entourage of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte. Little is known of its history between those years and 25 June 1971, when its owners attempted to sell it at Christie's in London, it remained unsold at 130,000 guineas, despite the confidence of the restorer Juan Corradini of Buenos Aires. Converts were Benedict Nicolson and Mina Gregori. Today it is considered an autograph work, it was acquired by the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1973. It is thought that the painting was in the collection of Caravaggio's patron Ottavio Costa, his will of 6 August 1606, contains a painting by this description and states that Riggerio Tritonio, secretary of Cardinal Montalto, is to choose between the Martha and Mary and a Saint Francis.
Since the Saint Francis appears in the inventory of Tritinio, it has been assumed that the Martha and Mary passed to Herrera in late 1606. Giovanni Enriquez de Herrera died on 1 March 1610, without a will, thus leaving his four sons to decide on the fate of his possessions, it has been speculated that it remained in Rome until the 1620s, but the only firm evidence for its provenance after the Herrera family is a seal and inscriptions on the back of the original canvas with the names Niccolò Panzani, Emilia Panzani and Anna E. Panzani; this family has not been traced. Since its rediscovery, its influence has become apparent, most notably in the number of copies, a now lost work by Carlo Saraceni and a well known version by Orazio Gentileschi, today in Munich; the painting shows the sisters Mary from the New Testament. Martha is in the act of converting Mary from her life of pleasure to the life of virtue in Christ. Martha, her face shadowed, leans forward, passionately arguing with Mary, who twirls an orange blossom between her fingers as she holds a mirror, symbolising the vanity she is about to give up.
The power of the image lies in Mary's face, caught at the moment. Martha and Mary was painted while Caravaggio was living in the palazzo of his patron, Cardinal Del Monte, his paintings for Del Monte fall into two groups: the secular genre pieces such as The Musicians, The Lute Player, Bacchus - all featuring boys and youths in somewhat claustophobic interior scenes - and religious images such as Rest on the Flight into Egypt and Ecstasy of Saint Francis. Among the religious paintings was a group of four works featuring the same two female models, together or singly; the models were two well-known courtesans who frequented the palazzi of Del Monte and other wealthy and powerful art patrons, their names were Anna Bianchini and Fillide Melandroni. Anna Bianchini appeared first as a solitary Mary Magdalene in the Penitent Magdalene of about 1597. Fillide Melandroni appeared in a secular Portrait of a Courtesan done the same year for Del Monte's friend and fellow art-lover, the banker Vincenzo Giustiniani.
In 1598 Caravaggio painted Fillide again as Saint Catherine, capturing a beauty full of intelligence and spirit. In Martha and Mary the two are shown together, Fillide fitted to the role of Mary, Anna to the mousier but insistent presence as Martha. A finely grained cream-brown table running in front of the sisters displays three objects, of which a Venetian mirror is the most obvious, it reflects the Magdalen's hand and a rectangular window, to which reflection her middle finger points. The other two objects are a dish with a sponge; the type of dish was called a sponzarol by the Venetians and, in this case, is made of alabaster. Mary wears red, the colour of the Magdalen, a dress similar to one Caravaggio employs in his Portrait of a Courtesan and Saint Catherine, with embroidery on the blouse, similar to what we see in his Penitent Magdalen; the writings of the Church Fathers established Martha and Mary as representative of the active versus the contemplative aspects of Christian faith. This distinction was exemplified in art like Bernardino Luini's Martha and Mary, once in the Barberini Collection in Rome, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.
Caravaggio would have known the painting. The painting was investigated by the scientists at the Detroit Institute of Arts; the pigment analysis revealed the usual pigments of the Baroque period such as lead white and yellow ochre and azurite
Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy (Caravaggio)
Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It is held in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut; the painting was the first of Caravaggio's religious canvasses, is thought to date from 1595, when he had entered the household of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte. It was painted at the behest of Del Monte, is thought to be one of the first paintings done by the artist as "Del Monte's painter", as he is believed to have described himself over the next few years while living in Palazzo Madama, it shows Saint Francis of Assisi at the moment of receiving the signs of the Stigmata, the wounds left in Christ's body by the Crucifixion. The story is told by one of Brother Leo. In 1224 Francis retired to the wilderness with a small number of his followers to contemplate God. On the mountainside at night Brother Leo saw a six-winged seraph come down to Francis in answer to the saint's prayer that he might know both Christ's suffering and His love: All of a sudden there was a dazzling light.
It was as though the heavens were exploding and splashing forth all their glory in millions of waterfalls of colours and stars. And in the centre of that bright whirlpool was a core of blinding light that flashed down from the depths of the sky with terrifying speed until it stopped and sacred, above a pointed rock in front of Francis, it was a fiery figure with wings, nailed to a cross of fire. Two flaming wings rose straight upward, two others opened out horizontally, two more covered the figure, and the wounds in the hands and feet and heart were blazing rays of blood. The sparkling features of the Being wore an expression of supernatural grief, it was the face of Jesus, Jesus spoke. Streams of fire and blood shot from His wounds and pierced the hands and feet of Francis with nails and his heart with the stab of a lance; as Francis uttered a mighty shout of joy and pain, the fiery image impressed itself into his body, as into a mirrored reflection of itself, with all its love, its beauty, its grief.
And it vanished within him. Another cry pierced the air. With nails and wounds through his body, with his soul and spirit aflame, Francis sank down, unconscious, in his blood. Caravaggio's painting is less dramatic than the account given by Leo - the six-winged seraph is replaced by a two-winged angel, there is none of the violent confrontation described by Leo - no streams of fire, no pools of blood, no shouts or fiery images of Christ. Just the gentle-seeming angel, bulking far larger than the unconscious saint, Francis' companions in the middle distance invisible in the darkness; the subject had been a popular one since the 13th century: Giotto treated it about 1290, Giovanni Bellini painted a famous version about 1480-85. Caravaggio's version is much more intimate and marks a sharp change of key: the saint, who has the features of Del Monte, seems to sink back peacefully into the arms of a boy wearing a sheet and some stage-prop wings. There is little to indicate the subject beyond the saint's Franciscan robe - no sign of the Stigmata, or blood, except the wound in his heart, nor of the fearsome seraph.
Yet the atmosphere remains genuinely spiritual, the two figures lit by an unearthly effulgence in the dark night-time landscape where strange glimmerings flicker on the horizon. The scene is at once unreal. Del Monte kept it till the end of his life, several copies went into circulation and were valued
Judith beheading Holofernes
The account of the beheading of Holofernes by Judith is given in the deuterocanonical Book of Judith, is the subject of many paintings and sculptures from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. In the story, Judith, a beautiful widow, is able to enter the tent of Holofernes because of his desire for her. Holofernes was an Assyrian general, about to destroy Judith's home, the city of Bethulia. Overcome with drink, he is decapitated by Judith. Artists have chosen one of two possible scenes: the decapitation, with Holofernes supine on the bed, or the heroine holding or carrying the head assisted by her maid. An exception is an early sixteenth-century stained glass window with two scenes; the central scene, by far the larger of the two, features Holofernes seated at a banquet. The smaller background scene has Judith and her servant putting Holofernes' head in a sack, the headless body standing behind with his arm waving helplessly; the subject is one of the most shown in the Power of Women topos. In European art, Judith is often accompanied by her maid at her shoulder, which helps to distinguish her from Salome, who carries her victim's head on a silver charger.
However, a Northern tradition developed whereby Judith had both a maid and a charger, famously taken by Erwin Panofsky as an example of the knowledge needed in the study of iconography. For many artists and scholars, Judith's sexualized femininity interestingly and sometimes contradictorily combined with her masculine aggression. Judith was one of the virtuous women whom Van Beverwijck mentioned in his published apology for the superiority of women to men, a common example of the Power of Women iconographic theme in the Northern Renaissance; the Book of Judith was accepted by Jerome as canonical and accepted in the Vulgate and was referred to by Clement of Rome in the late first century, thus images of Judith were as acceptable as those of other scriptural women. In early Christianity, images of Judith were far from sexual or violent: she was depicted as "a type of the praying Virgin or the church or as a figure who tramples Satan and harrows Hell," that is, in a way that betrayed no sexual ambivalence: "the figure of Judith herself remained unmoved and unreal, separated from real sexual images and thus protected."
Judith and Holofernes, the famous bronze sculpture by Donatello, bears the implied allegorical subtext, inescapable in Early Renaissance Florence, that of the courage of the commune against tyranny. In the late Renaissance, Judith changed a change described as a "fall from grace"—from an image of Mary she turns into a figure of Eve. Early Renaissance images of Judith tend to depict her as dressed and desexualized. Renaissance artists, notably Lucas Cranach the Elder, who with his workshop painted at least eight Judiths, showed a more sexualized Judith, a "seducer-assassin": "the clothes, introduced into the iconography to stress her chastity become sexually charged as she exposes the gory head to the shocked but fascinated viewer", in the words of art critic Jonathan Jones; this transition, from a desexualized image of Virtue to a more sexual and aggressive woman, is signaled in Giorgione's Judith: "Giorgione shows the heroic instance, the triumph of victory by Judith stepping on Holofernes's severed, decaying head.
But the emblem of Virtue is flawed, for the one bare leg appearing through a special slit in the dress evokes eroticism, indicates ambiguity and is thus a first allusion to Judith's future reversals from Mary to Eve, from warrior to femme fatale." Other Italian painters of the Renaissance who painted the theme include Botticelli and Paolo Veronese. In Germany an interest developed in female "worthies" and heroines, to match the traditional male sets. Subjects combining sex and violence were popular with collectors. Like Lucretia, Judith was the subject of a disproportionate number of old master prints, sometimes shown nude. Barthel Beham engraved three compositions of the subject, other of the "Little Masters" did several more. Jacopo de' Barberi, Girolamo Mocetto, Parmigianino made prints of the subject. Judith remained popular in the Baroque period, but around 1600, images of Judith began to take on a more violent character, "and Judith became a threatening character to artist and viewer." Italian painters including Caravaggio, Leonello Spada, Bartolomeo Manfredi depicted Judith and Holofernes.
The influential composition by Cristofano Allori, which exists in several versions, copied a conceit of Caravaggio's recent David with the Head of Goliath: Holofernes' head is a portrait of the artist, Judith is his ex-mistress, the maid her mother. In Artemisia Gentileschi's painting Judith Slaying Holofernes, she demonstrates her knowledge of the Caravaggio Judith Slaying Holofernes of 1612. A different composition in the Pitti Palace in Florence shows a more traditional scene with the head in a basket. While many of the above paintings resulted from private patronage, important paintings and cycles were made by church commission and were made to promote a new allegorical reading of the st
