Internationally famous for his dazzling technical skill as an engraver, the Haarlem artist Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) was equally accomplished as a draughtsman. He spent much of his early career establishing the thriving printmaking business that spread his distinctive Mannerist style throughout Europe. In 1590, Goltzius traveled to Italy, visiting Venice, Bologna, Florence, and Naples but spending most of his time in Rome, where he made dozens of drawings after antique monuments and sculpture. After his return to Haarlem, he initially concentrated on engraving but turned instead to painting for the last seven years of his life.(1)

Judith with the Head of Holofernes depicts the moment after the Old Testament heroine Judith has beheaded the drunken Assyrian leader, saving her fellow Israelites from defeat and her city of Bethulia from invasion. Probably executed around the time of Goltzius’s trip to Rome, the study demonstrates his intense study of Italian art. While Judith’s sinuous pose and the effortless grace with which she has dispatched Holofernes both recall Goltzius’s earlier, more mannered style, the monumentality of the figure and the simplicity of the composition demonstrate his new familiarity with classical sculpture and High Renaissance painting. His handling of pen and ink recalls the swelling and tapering lines of his engraving technique. Here, he used the variation in line to express to the passage of light: for instance, he used thinner contours to delineate Judith’s arm on the lightstruck side and thicker ones on the shadowed side.

The style and technique of this drawing both suggest that it was intended to serve as a model for an engraving, apparently never executed. The use of pen and brown ink shaded with gray wash and heightened with gouache is consistent with the working methods of Goltzius and his contemporaries when producing drawings for experienced printmakers, who were entrusted with the task of translating these painterly sketches into the linear vocabulary of engraving.(2) A drawing of The Penitent Magdalene by Goltzius now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, so closely related in composition, size, and technique as to suggest that the two drawings were intended as pendants, was incised for transfer and reproduced in an engraving by Jacob Matham (1571–1631).(3) Series of half-length biblical figures enjoyed a surge of popularity among Haarlem printmakers around this time and it is also possible that Goltzius planned to include both compositions in a similar series.(4)

Although Goltzius’s reputation suffered in the centuries following his death, his drawings continued to appeal to collectors. In about 1795, the Amsterdam artist Jacob Ernst Marcus (1774–1826) made a careful copy of this drawing for the album amicorum of his friend and fellow artist, Jacob Smies.(5)The meticulous nature of the copy suggests that Smies had the original before him as he worked, indicating that the Crocker drawing was probably still in a Dutch private collection at the time. Goltzius’s popularity with foreign collectors increased during the following decades, as nineteenth-century critics drew a distinction between the extravagant mannerism of Goltzius’s early career and the more classical approach he adopted after his trip to Italy, praising the latter. By the middle decades of the century, when Crocker acquired this study, Goltzius drawings had been dispersed throughout Europe and were considered crucial to major collections of Dutch drawings.(6) The Dutch were somewhat slower to value him, and by time of the late nineteenth-century “rediscovery” of Goltzius drawings, many fine examples of his draughtsmanship, like this drawing, had already left the Netherlands.