Judith, the Morning After
From the Whatifs Catalogue, the encyclopedia of paintings that never were. Lot of the day on Oct 16.
Created with AI, after Artemisia Gentileschi, public domain.
Judith, the Morning After is an imagined painting attributed, within the Whatifs fiction, to Artemisia Gentileschi (c. 1625). It belongs to the Whatifs series of works the great masters never painted.
History and rediscovery
After her Judith Slaying Holofernes, Artemisia is said to have painted the heroine the next morning, alone, washing her hands in a basin at dawn. Attributed for three centuries to "a follower of Caravaggio", it was reattributed in 2024 thanks to a signature hidden in the carpet pattern, revealed under raking light.
Sale
Within the fiction, the painting sold for €36,000,000 (2025). Tap the board above to replay the imagined bidding. The auction pictured below never took place.
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See also
- The Dancer Who Leaves, Edgar Degas
- Venus in Winter, Sandro Botticelli
- The Garden, the Morning After, Hieronymus Bosch
Notes
- Image generated with AI from a prompt written by Whatifs. No real painting, signature or auction house is reproduced.
- Story written for Whatifs. Any resemblance to real discoveries is coincidental.
