Florence is a city of great artistic violence. In its grand public square, Piazza della Signoria, statues variously hold up a severed head, grasp a screaming victim, and grab a doomed man by the hair as a sword is raised. A medieval alley off the piazza is named after the Baroncelli family, one of whose members was sketched as a dangling corpse by Leonardo da Vinci after he was hanged for his part in a conspiracy. Yet there’s no bloodier work of art in Florence than Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, which hangs in the Uffizi Gallery. Painted for the ruling Medici family, this masterpiece of slaughter depicts two women in the process of decapitating a huge man who is clearly still alive with his head partly sawn off.
As well as the gore, the painting contains a scientific mystery. This is Gentileschi’s second version of Judith’s bloody revenge on the invading Assyrian general. In an earlier, starker version, painted while a teenager, Gentileschi had shown the lifeblood of Holofernes flowing out in rivers over white bedsheets. But in her enhanced, enriched Uffizi canvas, she works a lot harder to show what the blood would really do if you sawed through the carotid arteries. As well as darkly soaking the bed, she depicts crimson blood bursting upward in powerful jets, curving in space to fall in perfect, eye-catching parabolas.
Where did she get that idea? Assuming she didn’t actually kill a man as an experiment, how did she understand the scientific reality of spurting gore so acutely? I have come to Florence to find out.
Gentileschi was born in Rome in 1593 into an artistic family from Tuscany. She arrived in Florence in 1613 at the age of 19 to work for the Medici duke. Other talented individuals were also drawn to the court of Cosimo II, including Galileo Galilei, the first modern scientist. In 1610, Galilei performed one of the most cosmic pieces of flattery ever when, in his book The Starry Messenger, he named the moons of Jupiter – which he had just discovered by telescope – the Medicean Stars.
In the 1990s, an academic paper by the historians David Topper and Cynthia Gillis claimed that Galileo shared his scientific ideas with Artemisia. It’s an amazing possibility and it seems inescapable to me that Galileo was her source of understanding of the arcing trajectories of spurting blood. This seems to be confirmed by the newly restored painting I have come to Florence to see, Artemisia’s Allegory of Inclination, now back on permanent view after a revitalising conservation.
It is in the Casa Buonarroti, a small museum dedicated to the Renaissance genius Michelangelo, created by his family. The conservation process included creating a digital mockup of what Artemisia’s near-nude woman floating in the sky looked like before it was covered up by drapery later in the 1600s by a more squeamish Buonarroti descendant.
I have to strain my neck as this is a ceiling painting, completed in 1617. It’s part of a complex allegorical ceiling by several artists that not only represents the life and achievements of Michelangelo Buonarroti but also emulates his heroic act of painting the Sistine ceiling. This is artistically awkward, because the room in Casa Buonarroti isn’t really high enough to survey a painted ceiling easily. But Gentileschi’s panel, newly buffed and polished, looks great. Every detail is sharp and clear, and points to a private meaning.
For if this is a tribute to Michelangelo, it is also a jokey homage to Galileo, peppered with nods to him. Not only is this nude floating above us in the very sky that Galileo opened up to human understanding, she also holds a compass, echoing experiments on magnetism he popularised. With heavy symbolism, the compass slopes downward, literally “inclining” towards the north, but also perhaps making a playful reference to Galileo’s experiments with inclined planes that were crucial to understanding falling motion.
Most striking of all is the bright yellow star set in the deep blue. It’s sketched in a few slashes and looks very like Galileo’s own sketches of stars published in The Starry Messenger. It’s as if Artemisia is paying a series of courtly compliments to the scientist. That strongly suggests that Artemisia was a friend of Galileo and, despite having received almost no education and only learning to read and write as an adult in Florence, was the first artist to put his theories into painterly practice, via her Uffizi version of Judith Beheading Holofernes.
It is easy to picture how the scientist might have explained parabolic curves. You can imagine him visiting Artemisia’s workshop, seeing her furious painting, commenting that surely the blood should shoot up when the artery is severed and that it would escape under pressure. He would then explain his theory that any projectile, from a cannonball to a spurt of blood, follows a parabolic curve.
In the Uffizi, I notice that Artemisia has painted the arcs of blood in little globules – as if she was showing individual projectiles, behaving like tiny cannonballs. Galileo’s advice would have been invaluable to an artist trying to paint with total realism.
Her other source was no doubt seeing animals being slaughtered. In Florence today, the city’s pride in butchery and meat eating is everywhere, from fresh cuts at the market to sweetbreads, lard and tripe in every trattoria. Those meaty traditions contributed to the devastating realism of Judith Beheading Holofernes: the man on the bed is dying like an animal, calmly butchered.
It was not an unlikely friendship. Galileo was keen on the arts: he admired Leonardo da Vinci, had strong views on poetry, and was skilled at drawing. And this sympathy for artistic creation is confirmed by a letter Artemisia sent to Galileo years later from Naples. She asks him to intervene and champion her work again with Duke Ferdinando as he had done back in 1620 when he successfully prevented Judith Beheading Holofernes “being lost to memory”.
Their relationship was a dialogue, not a lecture. If he spoke about physics with her, it was surely because he recognised her eye for the mechanics of violence. She shows Judith’s servant on top of the bed, holding Holofernes down. This is physics. It’s so real, you feel the forces at work – weight, pressure, momentum.
When Galileo revealed the truth of nature, a truth in which the Earth is not the centre of the universe, as the Church believed, but a rock orbiting the sun, he was hauled up before the Inquisition. In Artemisia’s painting we see why. To see clearly was to turn the world upside down.
• Jonathan Jones is giving a talk about Artemisia at the Extraordinary Women Symposium at Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, on Saturday 9 March
