Caravaggio: A Passionate Life by Desmond Seward

fetters in the hope of conjuring up thoughts of hell and arousing a wish to die in the penitent.
    But only now did Caravaggio start to paint severed heads. Historians date the earliest of these disquieting pictures to sometime during the last two years of the seventeenth century. There is no direct evidence that it was at the end of 1599, yet arguably what had been done to the Cenci at the Ponte Sant’ Angelo first inspired him.
    The poetry readings at the Palazzo Madama, or in any other great Roman household, must have included descriptions of decapitation. Sixteenth-century poets had seen plenty of beheadings. In
Orlando Furioso
Ariosto describes the death of the monster Orrilo, whose limbs had an alarming knack of rejoining his trunk after they had been severed. Having cut off hishead, under the delusion he has triumphed, the hero Astolfo rides away with it, but:
    The stupid monster had not understood
    And in the dust was groping for his head
    Astolfo realizes his mistake just in time, learning that Orrilo can be killed by destroying a magic hair on his head. He shaves the monster’s skull and ensures a happy ending.
    It is clear to anyone who looks at Caravaggio’s paintings that he was unhealthily fascinated by decapitations, especially those in the Bible. The first beheading he painted did not, however, come out of the Bible. It was, to use Baglione’s description, “a really frightening Medusa with vipers for hair, set on a shield.” The Medusa was one of the Gorgons, the three fearsome maidens from Greek mythology, with hissing serpents instead of hair and brazen claws instead of hands. She possessed a face so terrifying that anyone who looked upon it was turned to stone. To kill her, the hero Perseus had to use a mirror, so that he could cut off her head without looking at her face.
    The picture is painted on a leather shield. Blood drips from the head of Medusa, who shrieks in horrified disbelief, her eyes protruding in anguish. Bernard Berenson commented that it was very like the photograph of a head he had seen, taken “the instant after its owner was guillotined.” What makes the Medusa still more unnerving is that she may be a self-portrait of the young, clean-shaven Caravaggio. Despite its macabre quality, Cardinal del Monte valued the shield so highly that later he sent it as a gift to his illustrious friend the Grand Duke Ferdinand, at Florence, where it remains today in the Uffizi.
    Judith and Holofernes
was painted at about the same time as the
Medusa
. Judith was a Jewish heroine who saved Israel from the Assyrians by decapitating their general, Holofernes, as he lay in his tent in a drunken stupor. The Book of Judith relates how: “she took him by the hair of his head, andsaid ‘Strengthen me, O Lord God, at this hour.’ And she struck twice upon his neck, and cut off his head, and took off his canopy from the pillars, and rolled away his headless body. And after a while she went out, and delivered the head of Holofernes to her maid, and bade her put it in her wallet.”
    As his model for Judith, Caravaggio employed the prostitute Fillide Melandroni, who had sat for
St. Catherine
and for the
Conversion of the Magdalene
. Brows bent in fierce concentration, her strong, handsome face wears a look of disgust and savage concentration as she hacks off the Assyrian’s head with a hunting sword, the only sword a sixteenth-century lady would have been accustomed to handling. Holofernes screams in agony, a stream of blood spurting out as the blade slices through his neck. His contorted face is almost certainly a self-portrait of the artist, bearded by now. Judith’s maid, standing next to her mistress, holds a bag in which to put Holofernes’s head. An old crone, bald and toothless, her face is disfigured by huge wrinkles. For all the horror of the scene, there is something slightly comical about her—she is very nearly a caricature.
    Judith and Holofernes
is much more alarming than the
Medusa
. A