Judith with the Head of Holofernes

Felice Ficherelli · c. 1665

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

98.5 × 75.6 cm (38 3/4 × 29 3/4 in.); Framed: 123.9 × 105.5 × 10.8 cm (48 3/4 × 41 1/2 × 4 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

Ficherelli's Judith is not the warrior heroine of Baroque convention but a figure caught in quiet, almost tender contemplation — her expression unreadable, the severed head of Holofernes held with surprising delicacy against the warm darkness behind her. Felice Ficherelli, a Florentine painter of the mid-seventeenth century, earned the nickname "Il Riposo" — The Repose — for the unhurried, introspective quality that runs through his work. Trained under Jacopo da Empoli, he developed a style that softens the drama of his subjects, favouring cool, silvery flesh tones and a lyrical sensitivity more commonly associated with Florentine Mannerism than the full-throated theatrics of the Roman Baroque. That restraint is precisely what makes this canvas so unsettling: the violence is done, and what remains is stillness. Ficherelli returned to the Judith theme more than once across his career, suggesting a genuine fascination with the psychological moment rather than the act itself. A skilled hand-painted oil reproduction of this work captures what photography cannot: the soft gradations of light across Judith's skin, the subtle impasto, and the depth of Ficherelli's shadowed backgrounds — the qualities that make standing before the original in Chicago feel so unexpectedly intimate.