Judith et la tête d'Holopherne

Around 1900 the femme fatale was everywhere in Viennese art and writing, the beautiful woman who is also a danger, and Klimt gave the type its defining image here. The story is the old biblical one, the widow Judith who slips into the enemy general's tent, gets him drunk and cuts off his head to save her city. Klimt keeps only the aftermath. Holofernes's head is shoved into the bottom corner, half out of frame, while Judith fills the gold. Her lips are parted, her eyes half closed, her gown fallen open, and the whole background and her collar glow with beaten gold leaf that flattens the space into ornament. She looks less like a pious heroine than a woman in a kind of triumph. The model is thought to be Adele Bloch-Bauer, a friend and patron Klimt would paint again in gold a few years later.