Judith Slaying Holofernes

Judith braces one hand on the general's head and drives the blade through his throat while her maidservant pins his thrashing arms, blood arcing onto white sheets in raking Caravaggesque light. Artemisia Gentileschi painted this version in Florence around 1620, a decade after the rape trial that made her notorious, and she made the two women collaborators in the act rather than the shrinking figures of earlier treatments. Now in the Uffizi, it is the defining work of the most accomplished woman painter of the seventeenth century and the fiercest of all Judiths.