In the biblical account, Judith enters Holofernes' camp under the pretence of bringing him useful information, wins his trust and, on the fourth night, is left alone with him after he drinks himself into a stupor at a private dinner. She beheads him with his own sword, then hands the head to Abra, who places it in a food bag before the two women leave the camp as though going out to pray, a habit Judith had established over the preceding days specifically so that their late-night departure would not draw suspicion^[4]. The army learns of Holofernes' death only the next morning, once his body is found, by which point the Israelites have already routed the leaderless Assyrians^[1]. Paintings of this later moment, Judith and Abra with the head already taken, focus on their composure and nerve rather than on the act of killing, and depend for their drama on the risk of discovery rather than on physical struggle.

Gentileschi did not treat Judith as a single finished composition. Alongside the two well-documented beheading scenes, made around 1612 to 1613 and around 1620, she painted the subject of Judith with the already-severed head multiple further times, a body of work one survey numbers at five separate canvases in total^[2]. Versions of this type are held in collections including the Palazzo Pitti in Florence and the Detroit Institute of Arts, the latter showing Judith with her knife still in hand, raising her free hand in warning as a noise interrupts the two women while Abra packs the head into a sack, the whole scene lit by a single candle whose light Judith's own raised hand partly blocks^[3]. Each version varies the staging while keeping the same basic elements: two women, one head, one source of light, and a shared sense that the danger is not yet over.

Gentileschi was not alone in preferring this quieter aftermath to the beheading itself. Giovanni Baglione's 1608 painting and Peter Paul Rubens' version from around 1616 both show Judith and her servant leaving Holofernes' camp with the head rather than the moment of the killing, a choice that shifts the subject from violence toward escape and composure^[1]. Caravaggio, by contrast, had painted the beheading directly around 1598, in the version that most directly shaped Gentileschi's own early treatments of the subject. Read against that range of choices, aftermath paintings like this one belong to a distinct strand within the wider Judith and Holofernes tradition, one concerned less with the physical act than with the nerve required to carry it through undetected.