This spectacular painting was likely executed around 1618, when Procaccini was at the height of his dramatic powers. Commissioned by Giovan Carlo Doria, one of the most important Genoese art patrons of the seventeenth century, the painting captures the artistic zeitgeist percolating in the cosmopolitan port city in the early seventeenth century. Procaccini’s technical virtuosity recalls the painterly brilliance evident in the works Sir Peter Paul Rubens had produced during his time there in the previous decade.

Born into a family of artists in Bologna, Procaccini spent his career in northern Italy, largely in Milan. He began as a sculptor, working at the Fabbrica of the Milan Duomo, before turning to painting around 1600, and his powerfully modelled painted figures retain a sculptural sensibility. Procaccini established a relationship with Giovan Carlo Doria by at least 1611 and this Judith and Holofernes was produced between 1616—the date of Doria’s first inventory, which did not include the work—and 1621—when his second inventory, which did include the work, was completed. As one would expect in a work produced for Procaccini’s most important patron, Judith and Holofernes serves as a demonstration of the artist’s wide-ranging painterly abilities: Judith’s face is painted with exquisite finish, while the vibrant drapery is rendered with near-expressionistic freedom.

Procaccini spent much of 1618 in Genoa, where he was particularly prolific. Stylistically, Judith and Holofernes bears striking similarities with his Christ and the adulteress (fig. 1) and Penitent Magdalene with an angel (fig. 2), which both date from this moment. All three compositions are tight and compact, with the figures inventively cropped for dramatic effect. The use of warm, jewel-like tones and vigorous impasto speaks to the artistic influence exerted by Rubens, who had departed Italy in 1608, but whose sumptuous portraits and theatrical altarpieces produced for Genoese patrons, including Giovan Carlo Doria, would have been familiar to the artist.

Here Procaccini offers a palpable rendition of Judith, whom he depicts with an almost sculptural presence. Bedecked in silk and pearls, she smiles coyly at the viewer, to whom she turns back to face, as she holds Holofernes’s head. As the city of Bethulia, where Judith lived, collapsed under the Assyrian general’s siege, the beautiful and wealthy widow hatched a plan for salvation. Adorning herself “so as to catch the eye of any man who might see her,” she crossed the Assyrian battle lines together with her wily maid, Abra.¹ Enchanted by Judith’s beauty, Holofernes threw a banquet in her honor, hoping to seduce her afterward. Once he became inebriated, however, Judith seized the opportunity: wielding Holofernes's own sword, she beheaded him with two deft blows. Assisted by Abra, Judith hid the general's head in a sack and escaped the Assyrian camp. Once Holofernes's demise was discovered, his army fled in disarray.

The subject’s dual conceit—as an allegory of virtuous struggle triumphing over depraved tyranny and as an admonition against man’s downfall at the hands of a cunning woman—resonated strongly in the first decades of the seventeenth century, when many artistic interpretations of the theme were produced. Procaccini himself revisited Holofernes’s demise in the 1620s (fig. 3), the same years that Orazio Gentileschi depicted the decapitation (fig. 4) for another Genoese patron, Pietro Gentile.

Judith and Holofernes appears in the second inventory documenting Giovan Carlo Doria’s collection, drawn up between 1617 and 1621.² The canvas is listed among almost five hundred paintings, including works by Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Simon Vouet, among others. Procaccini’s painting reappears in Giovan Carlo’s posthumous inventory, compiled between 1625 and 1641, by which time the work had passed to his son, Agostino Doria.³ Following the latter’s death in 1644, the painting was inherited by Giovan Carlo’s brother, Marcantonio, whose initials are inscribed on the original canvas’s verso. The painting likely remained in the possession of the Doria family until at least 1780, when Carlo Giuseppe Ratti lists a work by Procaccini with the same subject in the collection of Marcantonio IV, Prince of Angri.⁴

¹ Judith (10:5).

² Inv. no. 401: "Giudita del Prochassino." The inventory, contained in the Archivio Doria d’Angri, Naples, is transcribed in Brigstocke and D’Albo 2020, p. 437.

³ Inv. no. 114: "Giudit di Procaccino." As above, the inventory is contained in the Archivio Doria d’Angri, Naples, and transcribed in Brigstocke and D’Albo 2020, p. 437.

⁴ "Una Giuditta, del Procaccino" hung in the Salotto primo. Ratti 1780, p. 332.