Judith and Holofernes

In bright light two women carry away a severed head on a platter, while in the dark tent beside them the headless body still twitches and a guard sleeps. Michelangelo painted this biblical rescue in a corner of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

The story behind the painting

The fresco, about 570 by 970 cm, dates to around 1508 and is part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling commissioned by Pope Julius II. Michelangelo began the vault near the entrance used for papal processions and ended above the altar. Judith and Holofernes, from the Book of Judith, chapter 13, fills the corner pendentive just left of the door, so it was one of the very first scenes he painted. It is one of four corner scenes from the Old Testament about God protecting the people of Israel.

What to look for

The scene falls into three zones. At the centre, in full light before a slanting white wall, Judith and her maid have already killed the tyrant and carry his head on a metal platter on the maid's head, as Judith begins to cover it with a cloth. At right, in darkness, Holofernes lies naked on his bed, still in spasms: one arm seems dead, the other rises threateningly, a leg pushes against the sheets. Judith hides her face but seems to turn toward the body. At left a sleeping guard in green rests on a red shield. The women's clothes glow in blues, yellows, green, pink and red.

Meaning and intent

The women were transferred from a cartoon by pouncing, Holofernes was painted in a single day with outlines incised in wet plaster, and the soldier was painted directly without preparation. The scene pairs with David and Goliath in the opposite corner: in both, unlikely heroes, a woman and a youth, free Israel from terrible enemies, foreshadowing the triumph of the Church and alluding to victorious humility. Unlike the Bible, where the head goes into a bag, Michelangelo used a platter, a type popularised by Botticelli's panels in the Uffizi, and he showed a walled room rather than a tent, following the Malermi Bible's wording.

Legacy

The head of Holofernes is probably a self-portrait of Michelangelo, according to Charles de Tolnay, Agoston and Frank Zollner, rather than a portrait of Julius II as James Beck argued in 2001. A first idea for the scene, in charcoal, is kept at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, with the figures arranged differently. The strong contrast between the bright centre and the shadowy corners follows the concave, triangular shape of the ceiling and creates a remarkable sense of depth that still draws the eye in the Vatican Museums.