News of Caravaggio’s Execution
Left: Detail of Holofernes' head from Caravaggio's Judith and Holofernes (c.1599)
Right: Detail of Caravaggio's Self-Portrait as Medusa (1597), rotated.
I don’t think anyone has ever noticed that Holofernes’ head in Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes is the mirror-image, modeled by someone else, of his own Self-portrait as Medusa from two years earlier. The idea, then, that Holofernes’ decapitated head is Judith’s capolavoro, “masterpiece” or literally “head-work”, gains support. The pun explains that Judith is the artist’s alter ego “painting” her masterpiece, Holofernes’s head, by executing him just as Caravaggio executed his own shadow-double in the Medusa.
For an explanation of the painting on the level we are concerned with, see the newly published entry Caravaggio's Judith and Holofernes.
Posted 16 Apr 2011: CaravaggioVisual Perception
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