Judith

The biblical story of the brave Judith has often been depicted in art. Judith, a chaste widow, gets the enemy commander Holofernes drunk with divine help, and then beheads him to free her people. Gustav Klimt interprets the Old Testament heroine as an erotic femme fatale. She gazes seductively at the viewer through half-closed eyes, her lips slightly parted. Only on closer inspection do we see the decapitated head of Holofernes. Judith holds it almost tenderly, as if to push it out of the picture. In Klimt’s painting there is no room for the male aggressor. He has transformed the biblical story of resistance in a political conflict into a battle of the sexes, and Judith’s triumph into a dangerously tantalizing icon of femininity.