page_title: Judith and the Head of Holofernes
section_title: Context and influences
hierarchical_section_title: Judith and the Head of Holofernes / Context and influences
context_page_description: Judith and the Head of Holofernes is an oil painting by Gustav Klimt created in 1901. It depicts the biblical character of Judith holding the severed head of Holofernes.
context_section_description: When Klimt tackled the biblical theme of Judith, the historical course of art had already codified its main interpretation and preferred representation. In fact, many paintings exist describing the episode in a heroic manner, especially expressing Judith's courage and virtuous nature. Judith appears as God's instrument of salvation, but the violence of her action cannot be denied and is dramatically shown in Caravaggio's rendering, as well as those of Gentileschi and Bigot. Other representations have depicted the subsequent moment, when a dazed Judith holds Holofernes' severed head, as Moreau and Allori anticipate in their suggestive mythological paintings. 
  Klimt deliberately ignores any narrative reference whatsoever, and concentrates his pictorial rendering solely on to Judith, so much so that he cuts off Holofernes' head at the right margin. And there is no trace of bloodied sword, as if the heroine would have used a different weapon: an omission that legitimates association with Salome. The moment preceding the killing – the seduction of Nebuchadnezzar's general – seems to coalesce with the conclusive part of the story.
  Judith I shares elements of its composition and symbolism with The Sin by Franz Stuck: the temptation illustrated by the German painter becomes the model for Klimt's femme fatale by suggesting the posture of the disrobed and evanescent body as focal piece of the canvas, as well as the facial set. Judith's force originates from the close-up and the solidity of posture, rendered by the orthogonal projection of lines: to the body's verticality (and that of Holofernes') corresponds the horizontal parallels in the lower margin: those of the arm, the shoulders joined by the collier, and finally the hair base. 
  Judith was the biblical heroine who seduced and then decapitated General Holofernes in order to save her home city of Bethulia from destruction by the Assyrian army.
caption: The Sin, by Franz Stuck, 1893.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "2010:10:21 22:13:26", "Image ExifOffset": "156", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "294", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6488", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1848", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3071"}