A couple of days ago I used the blog to draw attention to the (often under-rated) importance of imagination. Quite by coincidence today I came across an illustration of Giuseppe Vermiglio’s Judith and Holofernes. It struck me as a seventeenth century re-working of the far superior treatment of the same idea by Caravaggio. What is more, it is a striking example of the lack of imagination.
If you are not familiar with this Biblical story, it concerns the beheading of the tyrant Holofernes, who was oppressing the ancient Jews, by the Jewish heroine Judith.* In this version, the artist fails entirely (in my opinion) to enter this dreadful scene in the imagination. The heroine, Judith, is having to make a second attempt to sever the head, the first stroke having been only partly effective. Both Judith and her maid look mildly irritated by her failure to complete the job with her first blow. Her victim looks about as discomfited by the situation as if he had been discovered cheating at cards. The picture has no emotional power at all, because the artist has failed to allow his imagination to inhabit these scene.
I couldn’t help but compare this version with the original by Caravaggio, in which Judith is manifestly having to steel herself to go through with the action on which she is determined, and Holofernes is believably agonised by what is happening to him. The face of the maid is a thoroughly convincing depiction of hatred for the victim which enables her to subdue any vestige of human sympathy for her oppressor. Caravaggio experienced some pretty violent episodes in his life, but I have no reason to believe that he ever witnessed a decapitation. This is a triumph of the imagination in its capacity to convince us of the immediate reality of what we are witnessing.
If you need to be convinced of the fate of art when the artist fails to inhabit the scene in the imagination, then a comparison of these two images should make the point.
*If you are not familiar with this story it’s not altogether surprising because it is in the “Apocrypha” …. a group of books not included in all versions of the Bible, but a popular theme among renaissance artists.