Florence is a city of great artistic violence. In its grand public square, Piazza della Signoria, statues variously hold up a severed head, grasp a screaming victim, and grab a doomed man by the hair as a sword is raised. A medieval alley off the piazza is named after the Baroncelli family, one of whose members was sketched as a dangling corpse by Leonardo da Vinci after he was hanged for his part in a conspiracy. Yet there’s no bloodier work of art in Florence than Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, which hangs in the Uffizi Gallery. Painted for the ruling Medici family, this masterpiece of slaughter depicts two women in the process of decapitating a huge man who is clearly still alive with his head partly sawn off.
As well as the gore, the painting contains a scientific mystery. This is Gentileschi’s second version of Judith’s bloody revenge on the invading Assyrian general. In an earlier, starker version, painted while a teenager, Gentileschi had shown the lifeblood of Holofernes flowing out in rivers over white bedsheets. But in her enhanced, enriched Uffizi canvas, she works a lot harder to show what the blood would really do if you sawed through the carotid arteries. As well as darkly soaking the bed, she depicts crimson blood bursting upward in powerful jets, curving in space to fall in perfect, eye-catching parabolas.
