“What a shockingly bold picture! This extraordinary Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Giulio Cesare Procaccini was created for one of the most important collectors in Genoa, Gian Carlo Doria, who was also a patron of Rubens during the Flemish master’s stay in Italy.” Keith Christiansen, Curator Emeritus, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York The striking Apocrypha story of Judith is here depicted by Guilio Cesare Procaccini, one of the leading Milanese artists of the seventeenth century. The work was commissioned by Gian Carlo Doria, one of the most important Genoese art patrons of the seventeenth century, in the 1610s, when Procaccini was at the height of his artistic powers. Though the work's provenance can be traced in the seventeenth century, the painting is a recent discovery, reappearing only in 1992, when sold at Sotheby’s, London for £209,000.

The story of Judith and Holofernes was especially popular during the 17th century and widely represented in music, literature, and the visual arts. According to the biblical narrative, the beautiful widow Judith enters the tent of the cruel tyrant Holofernes, an Assyrian general about to destroy her home city of Bethulia. Once overcome with drink, Holofernes passes out and is swiftly decapitated by Judith. In Procaccini’s Judith and Holofernes, the artist depicts the moment immediately after the decapitation: Judith’s elderly female servant, who appears out of the darkness in the composition’s upper right, has yet to discard with Holofernes’s head.

Most striking is the tight and compact framing, through which Procaccini situates the viewer almost within the scene, thereby implicating them in the violent act. We are beckoned in further by a beguiling Judith who, bedecked in silk and pearls, smiles coyly with an almost gleeful glint in her eye.

The painting showcases Procaccini’s painterly abilities: Judith’s face is painted with exquisite finish, while her maidservant is rendered with a looser touch. The vibrant drapery in the bottom third of the work is executed with a near-expressionistic freedom.

“When this picture was purchased it was extremely dirty, so much so that when cleaned it became apparent that not only was this the original prime version by Guercino, of a picture known in a few other lesser examples, but that it also was dated to a magical early time in Guercino’s trajectory. It was from that early acquisition that a tone and taste level for the collection was established. For me personally, it became immediately apparent that only the boldest images of best quality by the greatest artists would be considered. Indeed, that is what the ultimate result was.” George Wachter, Sotheby’s Chairman and Co-Worldwide Head of Old Master Paintings. In a moving scene, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (nicknamed Guercino), captures the paternal anguish of Old Testament patriarch Jacob as he learns of the supposed death of his favorite son, Joseph. Likely completed in 1620, the work dates to Guercino’s celebrated early period, predating his first trip to Rome in 1621.

Painted during the ‘Golden Age’ of Guercino’s career, this work is the finest of the four known autograph versions of the composition. Guercino scholar Denis Mahon described the work as of “manifestly higher” quality than the existing versions and of superlative provenance: an engraving from the 1730s by Joseph van Loo bears an inscription that locates the painting in the collection of Simon Lenfant, who served as Louis XIV’s trésorier general and commissaire général des guerres. The work also corresponds with a painting recorded in the 1686 posthumous inventory of Maffeo Barerini, Prince of Palestrina.

In this arresting work, Jacob, holding his son’s bloodied coat, looks heavenward in confused desperation. Guercino paints with keen attention to Jacob’s wizened features, his upward glance and tormented expression underscoring his shock and distress. Rendering the scene more as an icon than as a narrative, Guercino omits Jacob’s sons who, jealous of his dotage on Joseph, plotted his demise, stripping him of his clothes, and flinging him into a well, before selling him for twenty pieces of silver to passing merchants.

Guercino’s scene deviates from earlier treatments of Jacob in the depiction of Joseph’s coat as a simple white garment, rather than a multi-coloured or richly embellished robe. This contrasts with Jacob, who is draped in a swaths of blue and purple fabric, further highlighting the illuminated white cloth splattered with shades of both crimson and red. Jacob’s lament can be seen as pre-figuring Christ’s Crucifixion, the blood-splattered coat anticipating Christ’s white loincloth.