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Judith Beheading Holofernes
A Feminist Icon
(subtitled Women Behaving Badly)
by Kelly Powell
On viewing this painting I realize that it will never
cease to amaze me that men have the courage, if not the
outright audacity, to fall asleep at all. The artist was
raped by her teacher. Her father pursued a public trial.
Her rapist convicted and answering to their long
relationship, the artist claimed a broken contract on her
Virtue--marriage. Her rapist being Single had had his first
wife killed. The artist’s brothers had not shown her
talent for painting, so their father had taught only her.
The artist taught her two daughters to paint. Due to their
Talent, none of their works survive. Said to have been
unable to write, the artist is quoted later in the same
source by her letters. Beheading her subject with paint
and canvas the artist leaves me a deer in chiaroscuro head
lights. I have often felt frontly lit, emerging out-of-the
blackness and one-sidedly illuminated. Just as I dare to
ask where in this painting’s brilliant perspective is our
apple? I end up slipping on the wet stones of The Fisher
Woman Returning From Bathing Her Children. 400 years later
a child hangs from each hip, I trip on dirty Under
wear and unscraped plates, pick up toys with my feet. I
find my lost keys in the wreckage. A bag of groceries in
one hand, another pushes a baby carriage. I shut the door
behind me with a third eye. The apple has rolled away, out
of its sack, awkward in its shape. Bruised and rotten in
places it sticks in the door. Open as is Pandora’s box.