Tuesday, September 29, 2009

The Bloody Work

Judith and Holofernes (1831) by the French painter Emile Jean Horace Vernet (1789-1863).

This today nearly unknown painting was a great event in its own time. The German poet Heinrich Heine wrote deeply impressed: "above her hips she wears an undergarment of pale yellow whose sleeve falls off her right shoulder and which she pushes up over her left hand in the manner of a butcher…
In her eyes above sparkles a sweet cruelty and the desire for vengeance; for she has her own violated body to avenge on the odious pagan...
Death sends him by the hand of a most beautiful angel into the white night of eternal oblivion. What an enviable end! If I should die one day, ye Gods, let me die like Holofernes!"

Men’s dreams!

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