This is certainly not a huge exhibition, the one that the Museo del Corso has organized with works from the Pinacoteca and the Kunstkammer of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. To give you an idea, I visited it three times at leisure without my back starting to sing Manrico’s cabaletta. Not very large, as I was saying, but fortunately art is not measured by weight. And there is art to be seen here. Masterpieces that are a pleasure to encounter or re-encounter in person, alongside spectacular discoveries, at least for this writer.
Such as the “Judith with the Head of Holofernes” by Johann Liss. To grasp its extraordinary quality, one need only take a few steps through the corridors of Palazzo Cipolla, until reaching another masterpiece on the same subject: Veronese’s “Judith”, which predates Liss’s by some forty years, those straddling the XVI and XVII centuries. Four decades that show in every brushstroke.
Liss first of all rotates his framing of the scene, positioning himself behind the protagonist. I am no iconographer, let alone an expert on the pictorial treatment of the story of the resolute widow of Bethulia, but I cannot recall ever having seen a composition of this kind. Which is the prelude to surprising discoveries.
In this close-up view, Holofernes’s torso pitches forward and creates a perspectival depth that Judith retraces in the opposite direction as she reaches toward the basket held by Abra, the handmaid, in a gesture that bares her shoulders — firm and at the same time soft, softer than the drapery wrapping her figure in a spiralling motion that stirs her whole form, and which is the first offspring of the Baroque.
More composed is the heroine of Caliari, whose fearsome deed leaves her hair undisturbed and does not even shift the precious armilla clasped around her left bicep. Only a button on the border has come loose from her blouse, barely revealing her shoulder. The crime, whose proof she holds between her hands, seems to have left no trace save in her gaze, which is an enigma hidden within a mystery. At first glance she appears to be fixing her handmaid, but looking more closely one sees that her eyes are lost in the void, as though searching for an authority to justify and the strength to sustain the act just performed.
Of an altogether different mettle is the reaction of Liss’s Judith. Like her elder sister, she too is caught in the moment after the apex of the story — the slaying of the Assyrian — has already occurred; but here the heroine’s bearing could not be more different. First of all because her gaze, in a gesture that could not be more Baroque, breaks the fourth wall and calls upon each of the tens of thousands of people who have met it to step bodily into the fictional space of the painting — a space kept rigorously separate from that of the viewer in Caliari’s still classical rendering; and then because the exhortation is carried with an expression so coy that it replaces the bewilderment of Veronese’s Judith with a kind of languor in which traces of an ambiguous sadistic pleasure can be detected, a pleasure the young woman seems to invite us to give her occasion to experience once more, in a mortal embrace whose ecstatic allure she conveys with a sensuality that is on the very verge of winning us over.
From Vienna to Rome. Habsburg Masterpieces
Museo del Corso, Palazzo Cipolla, Roma. 06/03>05/07/2026
English translation based on Claude.ai translation services.