Judith and the Head of Holofernes

A close-up instead of an execution scene

Judith fills the canvas, Holofernes survives only as a fragment

The painting is a narrow vertical, 84 by 42 cm, an unusual format for Klimt at the time, and it decides everything the viewer sees: Judith's figure, painted in oil with gold added, occupies almost the entire field. Her head sits just above center, throat and chest bare, a thin translucent fabric only hinting at clothing. The eyes are half closed, the lips parted — an expression closer to trance than to a victor's triumph.

Her right hand rests on the hair of the severed head, though the detail is easy to miss at first: Holofernes's head is dark, pushed to the right edge, and almost cropped by the frame of the canvas — nothing survives of the older iconography with a sword, blood, and a servant holding a sack. There is no interior or camp tent either: behind Judith's shoulders is a flat gold surface scattered with stylized trees, rosettes, and geometric pattern that refuses to read as wall, sky, or measurable depth. The only light in the composition is pictorial rather than physical: face, throat, and chest glow with a pale, almost porcelain tone precisely because they sit against unbroken gold, not because a window or lamp is implied off-canvas.

The fingers of the left hand, a dark choker-like collar at the throat, and the hair are rendered with near-jeweller's precision, while the background stays deliberately flat — a living body and a decorative plane occupy one frame under two different sets of rules. The collar echoes the theme of beheading without showing any weapon. That collision of intimate, fleshy painting with ornamental gold is the picture's first visual effect, read by most viewers before they even recall the biblical story.

A model with no confirmed name, a frame made by his brother

How the gold reached the canvas before the trip to Ravenna

Klimt finished Judith in 1901 for the tenth exhibition of the Vienna Secession, held that March through May; the canvas went on public view almost immediately after completion. It is one of the first instances in which the artist embedded actual gold leaf in a painting rather than a yellow pigment imitating metal — a device that would come to define his entire 'Golden Period'.

Chronologically, this precedes Klimt's celebrated trip to Venice and Ravenna in 1903, where he saw Byzantine mosaics and, by his own account, was struck by their effect. His interest in gold in Judith predates the journey usually cited as the source of his golden style; the 1903 trip seems to have reinforced and complicated a direction he had already begun.

Judith's face is often compared with the features of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the Viennese society woman Klimt would paint twice more, in 1907 and 1912, and would also fold into his image of Pallas Athena. No document names her directly as the model for this particular canvas, and her features are altered enough that the resemblance cannot be treated as a documented portrait. The hammered-metal frame, inscribed JUDITH UND HOLOFERNES, was made by the artist's younger brother Georg, a professional jeweller and engraver — turning the frame into part of the artwork rather than mere framing, and answering a confusion that had already started before the painting left the studio.

Skin and hair are built up in dense oil brushwork, while the gold is applied as extremely thin leaf laid onto the ground — combining painterly and goldsmith's technique on one canvas was unusual even among Secession-circle artists. One of the earliest published reviews dismissively called the result a 'gilded nutshell', a phrase that underestimated the technique's novelty while accurately registering how thoroughly gold envelops both subject and figure.

Byzantine gold and Vienna's femme fatale tradition

Mosaics, Japanese motifs, and the argument over who the villain is

The flat gold ornament behind Judith draws on a set of sources that occupied Klimt at the turn of the century: Byzantine mosaics seen in Venice and later Ravenna, Japanese woodblock prints, and ornament from the ancient Near East — sources he combined freely rather than quoting literally. Out of that mixture came the device that defines the Golden Period: flatness instead of perspective, pattern instead of architectural setting.

The subject itself grows out of a tradition turned inside out. Painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Lucas Cranach to Caravaggio, showed Judith either as a cold instrument of divine will or as a woman recoiling from her own act. Klimt strips out both piety and revulsion, leaving only sensual self-possession — the femme fatale that obsessed Viennese culture of the period, following the Salome of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. The Book of Judith itself, notably, is absent from the Hebrew canon of the Old Testament and is considered non-canonical in Jewish and Protestant tradition, while Catholic and Orthodox tradition treat it as deuterocanonical; the status of a borderline, not strictly obligatory text had long given painters more latitude than gospel scenes allowed.

Klimt carries the same gold language into The Kiss, a work from a few years later shown here as a neighbouring entry: there, ornament stops being background and becomes fabric the figures are literally wrapped in. And Judith's unreadable gaze, aimed straight at the viewer, recalls another enigmatic half-smile — Leonardo's Mona Lisa — which for centuries has held viewers with the same device of a direct look that resists a single reading, even though the two paintings speak entirely different visual languages.

From a Viennese patron to a Swiss auction house

Three private owners before the painting reached the Belvedere

The canvas sold straight out of the tenth Secession exhibition in March 1901; its first owner was the Viennese entrepreneur and patron Anton Loew. After his death in 1907, Judith passed by inheritance to Sophie Loew-Unger, who kept it for thirteen years.

In April 1920 the painting went under the hammer at the Galerie Moos auction house in Geneva, bought by Berthe Hodler — widow of the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler — for 3,750 Swiss francs. It remained in her hands for more than three decades, until 1954, when it was purchased by the Österreichische Galerie, today's Belvedere. The work spent nearly half a century in private hands and only settled into Austria's state collection in the mid-twentieth century, where it remains today, in the Upper Belvedere, under inventory number 4737.

Over these decades Judith travelled widely as an exhibit: it was shown in Munich in 1901, Berlin in 1905, Zurich in 1918, and later in major Klimt retrospectives in Paris, New York, and Tokyo. Since 1954 it has appeared in more than forty exhibitions worldwide while remaining a permanent part of the Vienna collection — unlike many other Klimt works, whose twentieth-century fate was interrupted by sales, ownership disputes, or war.

Unlike the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which after a long restitution case and the film Woman in Gold became a symbol of Nazi-looted art recovered, Judith carries no such dramatic wartime history: it changed hands through ordinary channels — inheritance, auction, museum purchase — without seizure or litigation, and that quiet provenance file sets it apart from other landmark canvases of the Golden Period.

A saviour still mistaken for a seductress

Why the painting is still called 'Salome' today

The confusion with Salome did not end in 1901. Even after Georg Klimt engraved the heroine's name onto the frame, reproductions and press captions kept calling the picture Salome — subject and image had fused so tightly in public perception that in 1909 Klimt himself painted a second version under his own title Judith II, harder-edged and more predatory in expression. Critics almost immediately began calling that one Salome too, so the same confusion repeated a second time.

The early critic Felix Salten described the heroine's gaze as carrying 'a sultry fire in her dark glances, cruelty in the lines of her mouth' — a line that helped cement the painting's reputation as one of the first frankly sexual images of the femme fatale in early-twentieth-century Viennese painting, alongside Klimt's later canvases on serpents and Danaë. Two years later, in 1903, the Secession's eighteenth exhibition was devoted entirely to Klimt, and Judith was shown there again, no longer a one-off sensation but a recognizable signature.

Today Judith appears on book covers, museum pins, and posters more often than many other Golden Period works; together with The Kiss it forms the visual shorthand by which people recognize Klimt even without having seen his other paintings. The jewelled frame-construction, blurring the line between painting and applied art, anticipated the aesthetic of the Wiener Werkstätte, the association of artists and designers founded two years after Judith left the studio. For many viewers meeting Vienna 1900 art for the first time, this canvas — rather than the Bloch-Bauer portraits or The Kiss — is the first proof that gold could function as a full pictorial material rather than mere decoration.