“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.

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“We are immensely grateful to the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, one of the most spectacular collections in Italy, and to the Fondo Edifici di Culto del Ministero degli Interni (the Foundation for Religious Buildings) for this unprecedented Caravaggio loan to our special exhibition,” commented Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “The Flagellation of Christ is one of Caravaggio’s greatest artistic achievements and a pinnacle of religious painting. We are thrilled that between March 1 and June 14, Kimbell visitors will have the rare opportunity to view two distinctly different paintings by the Italian master—-one the 1607 Flagellation in the special exhibition and the other the 1595 Cardsharps in our own permanent collection.”

In his Flagellation, conceived as a sacred altarpiece, Caravaggio depicts an emotional and tense human moment of impending brutality. By placing Christ in a brilliant shaft of light, Caravaggio focuses the composition on Christ’s expression and painful posture. The opposition between the anatomical perfection of Christ’s body, bathed by light, and the anger and ugliness of the shadowed men who torture him engages the viewer’s sensibility in empathic condemnation of such cruelty. In this and other works, Caravaggio ushered in the new Baroque style of painting by stripping away unnecessary figures and details—-popular in Renaissance painting—-and focusing on human feeling. The Flagellation of Christ features only four figures and a single column: its simplicity concentrates its emotional power.

The de Franchis family commissioned The Flagellation of Christ as an altarpiece for their chapel in the Church of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples (property of the Fondo Edifici di Culto del Ministero degli Interni), where it was on view for more than 300 years. Naples was a haven for European artists and patrons in 17th-century Italy. Caravaggio, a controversial figure, had fled there from Rome as an outlaw after killing a rival. Protected by the powerful Colonna family, he lived and worked in Naples on two separate occasions in his short life and perfected there his signature chiaroscuro technique—-literally the mastery of “light and shadow.” Caravaggio was influential throughout Europe, but the works he produced in the cosmopolitan city of Naples served to spread his fame, to cement his legacy in the history of European art and to inaugurate a new Neapolitan figurative style.

“There is no other artist like Caravaggio,” said Guillaume Kientz, curator of European art at the Kimbell. “His paintings are among the most ambitious and, at the same time, the most approachable of all artistic achievements, speaking directly to viewers’ eyes and hearts. His work has inspired generations of artists throughout Europe, and his influence is still felt today. The reason for that, I suppose, is his deep understanding of the reality of both the human soul and human body. He manages to turn religious martyrdom into a human drama and to give human drama a divine dimension and dignity, so that viewers can identify with the figures of his composition in their suffering and in their grace. He touches both the human and divine part in us.”

Napoli, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte

The breathtaking special exhibition Flesh and Blood features 40 masterpieces from the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, one of the most important art collections in Italy. This monumental gathering of paintings is a journey through the major artistic achievements of Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting—-featuring captivating stories, from Christian martyrdom to mythological passion, from the intimacy of private devotion to the grandeur of state portraiture. The exhibition includes paintings by some of the greatest artists of the 16th and 17th centuries, including Titian, Caravaggio, Raphael, Parmigianino, El Greco, Annibale Carracci, Artemisia Gentileschi, Guido Reni, Jusepe de Ribera and Luca Giordano. Their masterful paintings can be imposing or intimate, violent or tender, extravagant or humble, tragic or even seductive.

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