The best known version of the biblical subject, painted by one of the handful
of women in the Italian Baroque who made a career of it in their own lifetime.
The bodily effort of Judith and her maid holding down the Assyrian general, the
jet of blood, the tenebrist light inherited from Caravaggio: the violence is
all deliberate. It hangs in the Uffizi in Florence, and an earlier version is
at Capodimonte in Naples.
