Judith leans over the bed, one knee braced against it for counterweight, gripping a fistful of Holofernes' hair with her left hand while she draws the blade across his throat with her right^[6]. Her maid Abra, shown here as a younger and physically strong woman rather than the elderly attendant of earlier tradition, holds the general's shoulders and chest down so he cannot rise^[1]. Blood runs in thin threads down the white bedsheets and spatters both women's arms and clothing, a level of detail Gentileschi increased between her two versions of the scene^[1]. Holofernes' eyes roll upward and his mouth hangs open as the struggle passes out of him, while his legs are still shown flexed in a last, failing attempt to break free^[1]. The whole scene is lit from a single low source in the tenebrist manner associated with Caravaggio and his followers, the Caravaggisti, throwing the two women's faces and forearms into sharp relief against a plain dark ground^[2]. Judith wears a gown of deep gold and jewellery in this later version, a change from the plainer dress of the Naples canvas that gives her a more regal and deliberate bearing as she works^[1].

Gentileschi first painted Judith beheading Holofernes around 1612 to 1613, in a canvas now held at the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, likely completed during or soon after the public trial that followed her rape^[1]. That earlier picture is close in structure to this one: the same two women, the same low tent bed, the same single candle-like light. The Uffizi version, painted roughly seven or eight years later for the Medici court, intensifies nearly every element of the first. The blood is more extensive, rendered in long thread-like trails from the wound. Holofernes' legs, cropped out of the earlier canvas, are now visible and shown still kicking. Judith's sword is longer and her figure more twisted into the act, and the whole group carries what one historian has described as a nervous tension absent from the calmer first version^[5]. Art historians read the changes less as a softening than as a deepening of the same idea: a scene of two women, working together, overpowering a man far stronger than either of them.

In 1611, the year before Gentileschi's first Judith, the painter Agostino Tassi, hired by her father Orazio to tutor her, raped her. The prosecution that followed put Gentileschi through a seven-month public trial in which she was tortured with thumbscrews, a technique then used to test the truthfulness of testimony, and a transcript of the proceedings survives^[3]. Tassi was convicted but never served his sentence. Many writers have read Gentileschi's repeated return to violent, triumphant biblical heroines, Judith above all, as a working-through of that experience, and some accounts describe the paintings as a form of psychological revenge on men who had wronged her^[7][1]. Later scholars have pushed back on a purely biographical reading, arguing that it undersells Gentileschi's originality and range to treat every violent heroine as autobiography, and that the paintings succeed as compositions in their own right, independent of what is known of her life^[4]. Both readings sit alongside each other in the literature: the trial shaped the world she painted in, but it does not fully explain the pictures.