This grisly Bible story is visualised with acute, almost hallucinatory realism in Caravaggio’s Barberini masterpiece. In both his painting Judith and Holofernes that hangs in the Barberini Palace, Rome, and in the newly discovered picture of the same story – Caravaggio portrays a woman hacking off a man’s head with a sword.
Why has the BBC singled out the work of one of the greatest European artists as so potentially toxic and traumatic that it requires a graphic content warning? Caravaggio’s paintings hang in art galleries across Europe, with no warnings whatsoever. It gives web readers the opportunity to surf on before they risk being exposed to images of beheading.
In reporting a news story about the possible discovery of a new work by Caravaggio, the BBC website has placed this prominent text just below the headline: “Warning: The paintings featured below depict a graphic image.” Short of actually saying, “this is a trigger warning”, this is a trigger warning. It turns out such warnings are real after all, and that they can indeed be applied by clumsy do-gooders to great art that was created several centuries ago. Then the BBC put a warning on the art of Caravaggio.
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