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Kimbell to Present Caravaggio Gem
The Kimbell Art Museum announced today that it will display Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes as a Guest of Honor on loan from the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica in Rome, where it normally hangs in the Palazzo Barberini. The monumental canvas ranks among Caravaggio’s most groundbreaking masterpieces for its bold realism and the theatrical staging of its biblical subject. The painting will be on view in the Louis I. Kahn Building from September 14, 2025, through January 11, 2026.
“The Kimbell’s audiences are fortunate to be able to experience this fall and into the new year one of Caravaggio’s most dramatic and famous paintings,” said Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “A star of the recent, historic Caravaggio exhibition in Rome that attracted more than 450,000 visitors, Judith Beheading Holofernes joins the Kimbell’s own beloved painting by Caravaggio, The Cardsharps. These two works, along with our recent acquisitions of a moving Mary Magdalene by Artemisia Gentileschi and a striking still life by the artist known as the Pensionante del Saraceni, will offer a rare perspective on the revolution in art initiated by Caravaggio and his followers.”
Approximately six feet wide and five feet tall (195 x 145 cm), Judith Beheading Holofernes narrates a passage from the Book of Judith in the Old Testament Apocrypha. The protagonist is a beautiful young widow from a Jewish town that is under attack by the Assyrian army, led by the general Holofernes. She dresses in finery and visits the enemy camp with her maid under the pretense of helping Holofernes defeat the Israelites. After a banquet, the general falls into a drunken stupor, and Judith courageously decapitates him with his own sword, liberating her people.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1599–1600, oil on canvas. Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Roma (MiC) – Bibliotheca Hertziana, Istituto Max Planck per la storia dell’arte/Enrico Fontolan
Popular in art and literature since the Middle Ages, the story of Judith and Holofernes affirmed the triumph of virtue over vice, tyranny, or heresy. While most artists show Judith after the grisly deed, victoriously holding Holofernes’s severed head, Caravaggio depicts her at the critical moment, delivering the blow that will end the general’s life. Spotlit inside the tent, the actors appear to be shockingly within our reach. Resolute, Judith prays silently, as divine light courses through her arms to empower her heroic feat. She grips Holofernes’s hair as blood streams from his severed neck onto the white linen. His muscular body still roiling, Holofernes screams as he passes from life to death. Transfixed by this spectacle, Judith’s maid opens her sack to hide their trophy when they steal away from the camp.
Michelangelo Merisi was born in the town of Caravaggio in the north of Italy in 1571. Moving to Rome around 1595, the painter—who became known as Caravaggio—soon won the attention of the papal city’s elite and his fellow artists. Painted directly from live models with strong contrasts of light, his dramatic and innovative pictures—like the Kimbell’s iconic The Cardsharps (c. 1596–97)—were widely imitated. The Barberini painting’s first owner, the wealthy banker Ottavio Costa, treasured the masterpiece so highly that he covered it with a silk curtain and stipulated in his will that it should not be sold or removed from his family’s collection.
The exhibition of Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes follows the Kimbell’s Focus Exhibition SLAY in 2022, which displayed both Italian Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi’s and American contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley’s Judith and Holofernes paintings in dialogue.
Eric Lee added, “The stunning loan of Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes from the Palazzo Barberini concurrent with the special exhibition Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection makes for an exciting Roman season at the Kimbell.”
Judith Beheading Holofernes goes on view at the same time as the landmark special exhibition Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection. Fifty-eight masterpieces from the world’s most important private collection of ancient Roman sculptures, which before 2021 were unseen by the public for more than seventy years, are making their first-ever transatlantic voyage. Impressive figures of gods and goddesses, vivid portraits of emperors and their families, and masterfully carved funerary monuments highlight the artistic achievements of Rome’s High Imperial Period in the first to second centuries AD. Nearly half of the sculptures have been newly cleaned, conserved, and studied specifically for this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition.
The Kimbell periodically welcomes the long-term loan of works from fellow museums and private collections, displayed in the permanent collection galleries. These Guests of Honor are intended to complement the museum’s existing holdings, present the work of the Kimbell’s conservation program, and provide special opportunities for museum visitors. Other current Guests of Honor include Girolamo Romanino’s Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine (1540) and Anthony van Dyck’s Queen Henrietta Maria (1638), both on loan from the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; and Thomas Couture’s The Duel After the Masked Ball (c. 1857), Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Between Hope and Fear (1876), Claude Monet’s Sunset at Lavacourt (1880), Gustave Caillebotte’s Still Life with Oysters (1881), and Paul Gauguin’s Still Life with Ceramic Dish (1888), all from private collections.
Promotional support for the Kimbell Art Museum and its exhibitions is provided by American Airlines, the Fort Worth Report, and NBC 5. Additional support is provided by Arts Fort Worth and the Texas Commission on the Arts.
