Object first
Searches begin with Judith, Holofernes, episodes, objects, and uses—not a list of famous artists or museums.
The sweep behind the gallery
Object-First Research
Institutional fame is not evidence of an object’s importance. This audit begins with the subject tradition, searches across collections, and asks what each object changes.
64works now interpreted in the gallery
17Made-map placements outside Europe
16intentional text-only records
Ongoingcross-collection discovery sweep
The outside-Europe figure follows the Made map: it includes documented and explicitly ringed regional placements. Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #228 is excluded because MoMA identifies Rome only for the series, not the individual object.
Selection method
Discovery is broader
than display
Aggregator counts are not object counts. Duplicate records, reproductions, library texts, and documentary photographs are retained during discovery and resolved during verification.
Records are leads
Aggregator results include duplicates, documentary photographs, copies, texts, and imperfect metadata. Each displayed work is checked against a holding record wherever one is available.
Difference earns space
A work enters the gallery when it changes the history through medium, use, geography, episode, attribution, material setting, or cultural migration. Institutional prestige is not a criterion.
Absence remains visible
Rights restrictions, missing digitization, uncertain location, and weak cataloguing are recorded as research conditions rather than mistaken for lack of importance. A trustworthy link earns a text-only record.
Open ledger
What the wider sweep
made visible
Rights restrictions no longer keep a verified work out of the gallery: sixteen objects now have designed text-only records with the best available external link. The ledger is reserved for leads whose identity or object data still need resolution; works promoted to the gallery leave it.
Musée Goya, Castres
Josep Bernat Flaugier, Judith and Holofernes ↗
A Spanish-school, revolutionary-era interpretation found through France’s national Joconde catalogue, not through a standard Judith canon.Musée des Ursulines, Mâcon
Corrado Giaquinto, Judith and Holofernes ↗
An eighteenth-century theatrical treatment in a municipal collection; publication rights currently limit display here.Musée municipal, Soissons
Michelangelo Unterperger, Judith and Holofernes ↗
A central-European Baroque work whose survival in a regional French collection shifts the map of eighteenth-century reception.The unfinished exhibition
What the current sweep
still misses
Sixty-four objects are a working corpus, not a completeness claim. These are active research gaps—not categories presumed unimportant because they are difficult to catalogue.
- 01
Medieval object worlds
Three pre-1400 objects now establish biblical illumination and a Speculum typological pairing, but sculpture, stained glass, Biblia Pauperum cycles, and Judith imagery embedded in liturgical or architectural settings remain underrepresented.
- 02
Print networks
Six prints now establish Italian, German, Netherlandish, Mannerist, and Baroque routes of transmission. Woodcuts and further engravings by Hans Sebald Beham, Georg Pencz, Heinrich Aldegrever, Jacques Callot, and other Dutch printmakers still require a dedicated copy-and-variation study.
- 03
Literary reception
Old English Judith and Friedrich Hebbel now appear in the interpretation, but the exhibition has not yet mapped how literary retellings changed visual choices across languages.
- 04
Counter-Reformation settings
Naples, Rome, and Catholic court cultures need closer comparison across sermons, devotion, theatrical painting, and the politics of female exemplarity.
- 05
Jewish ritual and manuscript traditions
The Yeshiva Hanukkah lamp is now present, but one object cannot stand for the wider history of Judith in Jewish ceremonial art, manuscripts, performance, and regional Hanukkah traditions.
- 06
The second Caravaggio question
The canvas discovered near Toulouse has been attributed both to Caravaggio and to Louis Finson. It must also be distinguished from the related Judith in Naples, often treated as a copy after a lost Caravaggio composition. The Toulouse work remains outside the gallery until its identity, current record, and image status can be presented without overstating consensus.
Discovery layer
Cross-collection indexes
These indexes are used to find candidates, never as a substitute for the object record. Their blind spots are part of the method.
See the result as geography.
Open the two maps →