>>6118957>>6119074>>6119083>Caravaggio vs Artemisia Gentileschi depiction of Judith Beheading HolofernesBoth these paintings exist in multiple versions (I think Artemisia did a blue dress one). To be entirely fair, Artemisia painted a very cool sword, better than Caravaggio, I like the gold loop sword quillion hilt. But if you look at the overall composition I think Artemisia's version is flawed - in her painting, the three faces ie points of interest form a triangle, and the central line is dominated by the servant woman, a minor character,(her face is the first thing you see, looking top to down), whereas Judith is to the side, almost as an afterthought.
In contrast Caravaggio composition is mostly a strong diagonal, slicing bottom left to top right, following the sawing beheading sword motion line, the shock of the decapitation is central, actually slightly off-centre to unnerve you and draw your gaze unavoidably to it, and the old servant woman assisting is behind Judith.
Another way of seeing this: you can crop the old servant woman out of Caravaggio's composition, so that it is just Judith Beheading Holofernes, without ruining the overall structure of the painting. In Artemisia's version, there is no way of cropping out the minor character of the servant assistant without taking a chunk out of the other relevant characters, or leaving a truncated pair of floating arms etc. So I think Caravaggio's version is better. However, I also watched the 1997 Artemisia film (look, I really like damsel in distress themes hehe) the actress in that film is pretty attractive, yay
