Judith I

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About Judith I

Gustav Klimt's Judith brings the aftermath of a killing almost uncomfortably close. A woman rises through a narrow field of gold, her head tilted back and her lips parted. Jewellery presses against her neck. A translucent garment slips across her body. Only after meeting her gaze may the viewer notice the bearded head of Holofernes, crowded into the lower-right corner beneath her hand.

The painting is commonly called Judith I today, but that is not the whole history of its name. The Belvedere catalogues the work simply as Judith. Its original frame states the subject more fully in German: JUDITH UND HOLOFERNES. The number “I” became useful after Klimt painted a second, very different Judith in 1909. These are three naming layers around one 1901 canvas, not rival identifications.^[1][2]

The frame's inscription also settles an old confusion. Klimt's heroine is Judith, the widow who saves Bethulia by entering the enemy camp and beheading its commander. She is not Salome with the head of John the Baptist. Yet viewers in Klimt's own era repeatedly saw Salome in her erotic address, and the painting was even exhibited under that name in Berlin in 1905.^[1][2]

That mistake is part of the work's history because it exposes the difficulty Klimt created. The biblical Judith is a devout strategist and public deliverer. Klimt removed most of her story, retained the severed head and made her look startlingly modern. The painting neither cancels her sacred agency nor confines her to it. It asks what happens when victory, sexuality, ornament and direct female attention occupy the same image.

At a Glance

• ArtistGustav Klimt
• Current museum titleJudith
• Common distinguishing titleJudith I
• Original frame inscriptionJUDITH UND HOLOFERNES
• Date1901^[1]
• MediumOil and gold leaf on canvas^[1]
• Dimensions84 × 42 centimetres^[1]
• SignatureSigned at lower left^[1]
• FrameDesigned by Gustav Klimt; brass components made by his brother Georg Klimt^[1][2]
• CollectionBelvedere, Vienna; currently at the Upper Belvedere^[1]
• Inventory number4737^[1]
• SubjectJudith displaying or controlling the severed head of Holofernes
• First public appearanceTenth Vienna Secession exhibition, March 1901^[1][2]
• First ownerThe physician and collector Anton Loew^[1]

Judith, Judith I and Judith and Holofernes

Names matter unusually much in this painting. The Belvedere's short title, Judith, identifies the protagonist. The inscription across the top of the original frame adds the victim: Judith and Holofernes. Modern writing often calls the canvas Judith I to distinguish it from Klimt's 1909 painting now at Ca' Pesaro in Venice.^[1][6]

The sequence should not be reversed. Klimt did not title the 1901 work as the first instalment of a planned pair. “Judith I” is a later catalogue convenience. It is useful because searches for “Klimt Judith” otherwise bring together two paintings separated by eight years, different formats and different stylistic phases.

The frame inscription has a more immediate function. Without it, the tiny portion of a man's head could be overlooked, and the woman's eroticised presentation could encourage a different biblical identification. The inscription makes the relation explicit: this is the woman who acted, and this is the man she killed.

Klimt nevertheless allowed the image to complicate the words. The frame declares a pair, but the canvas refuses anything like equal pictorial presence. Judith commands nearly its entire height. Holofernes is reduced to a fragment at the edge. Naming preserves him; composition subordinates him.

The Story Behind the Painting

The Book of Judith is a deuterocanonical text set during a fictive military crisis. Its heroine is a wealthy and devout widow in the besieged town of Bethulia. When the community's leaders prepare to limit how long they will wait for divine help, Judith rebukes their attempt to test God and announces a plan of her own.^[3][4]

She dresses carefully, enters the Assyrian camp with her maid and gains access to Holofernes. Her beauty and apparent cooperation disarm the enemy commander. After he becomes drunk and lies alone in his tent, Judith takes his sword, strikes his neck twice and removes his head. Her maid places it in a food bag, and the two women return to Bethulia. The sight of the dead commander helps break the besieging army's power.^[5]

This is not a tale in which a woman merely happens to possess a dangerous attraction. Judith plans, speaks, deceives, waits and acts for a communal end. She crosses political and military boundaries that Bethulia's male leaders have failed to overcome. Her beauty is one instrument within a larger exercise of faith, intelligence and courage.^[3][4][5]

Klimt assumes that inherited story but does not illustrate it sequentially. No tent establishes the enemy camp. There is no maid, sword, bag, army or celebrating city. The picture begins after the decisive act and compresses public deliverance into an encounter among Judith, the victim's head and the viewer.

A Narrative Reduced to Two Faces

The canvas is just twice as high as it is wide. Within that upright strip, Judith fills almost every available zone. Her hair reaches towards the patterned upper field; her exposed torso spreads across the middle; Holofernes appears low and to one side. The organisation is frontal but deliberately unbalanced.^[1]

Klimt's reduction does more than modernise a biblical scene. It changes the kind of evidence the picture offers. A history painting might show the moment of the blow, the escape from the camp or Bethulia's response. Here, action has already hardened into a relation between the living and the dead.

Judith's face supplies the main event. Her eyelids lower without closing. Her chin rises. Her mouth opens slightly, creating an expression that can look triumphant, sensuous, exhausted or inwardly absorbed. None of those words alone is sufficient. The face gains force because it does not deliver a simple moral emotion.

The victim's face works differently. Only part of it is available. It cannot return Judith's look or ours, and it cannot recover the authority that his military office gave him. The painting turns a conflict involving cities and armies into an extreme economy of attention: one face looks outward; the other has become an object she controls.

Intimacy Without Miniature Scale

At 84 centimetres high, the canvas does not approach the dimensions of a monumental history painting. Yet Judith's body is enlarged enough to feel nearly present rather than miniaturised. Klimt uses the narrow width to bring face, collar, breast and hand into a tight vertical encounter.^[1]

The scale changes the emotional distance of the biblical subject. An expansive battle scene would distribute attention among setting, costume and action. This half-length format makes looking itself the arena. Judith's face is close enough for minute changes around the eyelids and mouth to matter; Holofernes is small enough to arrive as a shock of recognition.

The arrangement also resembles portraiture without becoming a portrait. Judith occupies the kind of concentrated field in which a sitter might advertise rank or character, but the severed head and inscribed frame prevent the identity from becoming socially ordinary. Klimt borrows portrait proximity for a figure whose name belongs to sacred narrative.

That hybrid helps explain why model hunting has remained so persistent. Viewers instinctively ask whose face confronts them. The painting answers first with Judith's name, while leaving the human features specific enough to sustain—without resolving—the desire for another identity.

Judith Looks Back

Judith does not avert her eyes in piety or stare down at the head in horror. She directs her attention beyond the surface. Because her eyelids are heavy and her head tilts backwards, the gaze is not a simple level confrontation. It seems to arrive through bodily sensation as well as thought.

This quality helped make the painting disturbing in 1901. The viewer is not allowed to inspect a safely distant heroine. Judith participates in being seen. She does not necessarily invite, seduce or judge us, but she denies the comfortable fiction that looking travels only in one direction.

Klimt reinforced that exchange by bringing her body close to the picture plane. There is little atmospheric space in which she could retreat. Pattern closes behind her, and the frame tightens around her shoulders and hair. The upper body appears almost pressed forward by the shallow gold field.

Self-possession is the most secure description of this effect. Judith has accomplished the act attached to her name, retains the evidence under her hand and occupies the centre without apology. Erotic responsiveness may be part of the painting's address, but it does not convert her into a passive spectacle.

The Body, Garment and Jewellery

Klimt exposes Judith's breast and upper torso while surrounding them with coverings that are more suggestive than protective. A fine veil or open garment crosses her body. Its transparency and decorated edges make the boundary between clothed and unclothed difficult to stabilise.

The jewellery is emphatic. A broad dark collar encircles the neck, and other ornamental bands answer the horizontal divisions around the torso. These elements make the body appear adorned and constrained at once. The neckpiece can read as luxury, armour or a visual echo of decapitation, though that last association remains an interpretation rather than a documented symbol.

Naturalistic flesh and flattened ornament do not simply oppose one another. Judith's skin carries subtle changes of temperature and shadow, while jewellery, garment and ground convert adjacent areas into rhythmic surfaces. Klimt makes the living body seem more palpable by placing it beside forms that resist depth.

The mixture frustrates any easy division between biblical costume and modern fashion. Judith is not archaeologically dressed for an ancient Assyrian camp. Her elegance belongs to Klimt's Vienna as much as to sacred history. Contemporary viewers could therefore recognise a type of modern, socially visible woman within the heroine, even when they disagreed about what that visibility meant.^[1][2]

Holofernes at the Edge

Holofernes occupies very little space, yet the painting would become another kind of image without him. His bearded head appears below Judith's right hand at the lower-right margin. The edge cuts into the form, and the nearby gold and fabric can initially conceal it.^[1]

Cropping makes the violence both explicit and strangely delayed. Once the head is recognised, Judith's posture is no longer merely languorous, and her hand is no longer a decorative gesture. The small fragment reactivates the entire narrative that Klimt has removed from view.

The marginal position reverses Holofernes's status in the story. The commander who threatened a city has lost body, army and spatial command. Judith, who entered his camp as an apparent outsider, now determines how much of him can be seen. Pictorial power follows the narrative reversal.

It would be a mistake, however, to treat the head as a meaningless accessory. Klimt has reduced Holofernes, not erased him. His fragment prevents the image from becoming a free-floating portrait of sensual confidence. Death remains physically attached to Judith's victory, even when ornament threatens to absorb it.

A Frame That Belongs to the Work

The original frame is not a neutral moulding selected after the canvas was complete. Klimt developed frame and image together, and designs in the Red Sketchbook already explore their relationship. His brother Georg, a trained metalworker, produced the brass components from Gustav's design.^[1][2]

Across the top, the words JUDITH UND HOLOFERNES operate like a heading. Along the sides and lower areas, linear ornament extends the image's vertical rhythms. The frame therefore performs several jobs: it names the subject, controls the proportions and carries pattern across the conventional border between artwork and surround.

Its material must be distinguished from the painting's. Brass belongs to the constructed frame. Gold leaf belongs to the canvas as recorded by the Belvedere. Both create metallic effects, but they are not interchangeable substances and were not made by the same hand.^[1]

The collaboration also complicates the simplest idea of authorship. Gustav conceived the ensemble and painted the canvas; Georg fabricated specialised metalwork. Calling it a Klimt frame is correct only if the phrase leaves room for this divided labour.

Most importantly, the inscription supplies contemporary evidence against the Salome identification. Later critics could rename the woman according to the type they thought they saw. The frame keeps answering them with the protagonists Klimt chose.

The frame also changes the rhythm of viewing. An ordinary surround might mark the point at which the painted fiction ends. Here the eye passes from pictorial vine and patterned hill into metal line and written name, then back into flesh. Material boundary and narrative boundary no longer coincide.

This continuity does not make frame and canvas identical. Georg's brass has a fabricated hardness that differs from the gold leaf and oil surface. Their coordination is designed, not materially seamless. The ensemble gains force by placing related metallic effects in neighbouring structures while preserving the specialist work required for each.

Assyrian Sources Transformed into Ornament

The background does not reconstruct a plausible location in Bethulia or Holofernes's camp. It is shallow, patterned and resistant to ordinary perspective. Belvedere research relates several motifs to illustrated Assyrian reliefs published by the British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard.^[1]

Scaled hills, vines and palmette-like forms could travel from archaeological publication into a modern decorative vocabulary. Lines in the frame have also been connected with the stylised beards seen in such reliefs. These correspondences give the painting an ancient Near Eastern register without turning it into documentary reconstruction.^[1]

Klimt's use of the material is selective. Repeated forms create surface energy and historical distance, but they do not map an excavated palace or reproduce an entire relief. Ancient source, biblical geography and Viennese design become intertwined rather than archaeologically reconciled.

That distinction matters because “Assyrian” can sound more exact than the evidence permits. Holofernes's army is called Assyrian within the Book of Judith's invented historical world, and Layard's images offered Klimt a visual archive. The painting uses that archive to construct an evocative setting, not to claim historical accuracy for the text.

What the Gold Is—and Is Not

The Belvedere identifies the canvas medium as oil and gold leaf. This is object-specific material evidence, not merely a description of yellow or ochre paint. Gold flattens the space, catches changing light and pulls figure, pattern and frame towards the same luminous plane.^[1]

Yet the metal does not dissolve every distinction. Judith's face and torso retain modelling, temperature and bodily volume. Holofernes remains a dark organic fragment. Gold occupies the field around them and turns the setting into something closer to an icon, textile or precious screen than a natural interior.

Because Judith predates the densest phase of Klimt's gold-rich work, it is often treated as a threshold. That is useful if it stays close to this object. Here gold creates a setting in which sacred association, luxury and modern design can coexist. It does not carry one fixed meaning that automatically applies to every later painting.

The visible material is secure; the precise chronology of its application is less so. Early designs do not yet show the eventual gold background, and a studio report from October 1899 described the painting as nearly finished without mentioning leaf. Belvedere scholarship accordingly proposes that Klimt added the gold during the extended work leading to the 1901 exhibition. This is a reasoned reconstruction, not a dated record of the application itself.^[1]

From the Red Sketchbook to the Final Exposure

Klimt began developing the composition well before its public debut. Red Sketchbook drawings from 1898 test Judith's placement and the relationship between canvas and frame. They establish that the narrow, integrated ensemble emerged through design rather than last-minute framing.^[1]

The drawings do not reproduce the final image in every respect. Nor does the surviving painting conceal all earlier choices. Infrared examination has revealed changes in the position of the arms and indications that more fabric once covered the breast. Klimt increased the exposure as he refined the composition.^[1]

This evidence supports a history of revision without providing a complete sequence. Infrared traces reveal alternatives below the visible surface, but they cannot always tell us how long an option remained active or why it was abandoned. The final body is the result of selection; it is not a transparent diary of each thought.

The altered covering is nevertheless significant. Judith's nudity was not simply inherited from the first idea and repeated without question. Klimt tested a more covered presentation and chose the stronger collision of flesh, veil and ornament that viewers encountered in 1901.

A Long Development, Completed in 1901

An October 1899 account from Klimt's studio described Judith as almost finished. The painting did not make its decisive public appearance until March 1901. The interval warns against treating “almost finished” as a precise technical condition.^[1]

Klimt may have continued revising the canvas, developed the gold setting and completed the integrated frame during this period. The surviving evidence does not allocate every month to a particular change. It does show that the work had a substantial gestation extending from sketchbook designs in 1898 to exhibition in 1901.^[1][2]

That timeline also weakens confident attempts to identify the face through a single social encounter. A composition developed over years can absorb drawings, remembered features and professional posing without functioning as a dated portrait sitting.

The 1901 date remains the appropriate public date because it marks the completed object known from exhibition and collection records. Earlier designs and reports explain its making; they do not create separate versions of Judith I.

The Tenth Secession Exhibition

The painting appeared at the Vienna Secession's tenth exhibition in March 1901. It arrived late enough to remain outside the printed catalogue, but its presence was noticed immediately. Anton Loew, a prominent physician and collector, bought it at the exhibition.^[1][2]

The circumstances suit an artwork poised between easel painting and designed object. Its custom frame, inscription and concentrated surface asserted autonomy on the wall even without a catalogue entry. The immediate sale also places the work within the networks of affluent modern collecting that sustained Klimt's independent career.

Later in 1901, the painting travelled to Munich. It returned to a larger account of Klimt's work in his 1903 collective exhibition at the Secession. Each appearance gave critics another opportunity to argue over the protagonist's identity, eroticism and modernity.^[1][2]

The early exhibition history is important because the work's later fame can make its disturbance seem inevitable. In 1901, the combination of biblical title, exposed body, metallic ornament and direct female address was new enough to require active interpretation.

Why Viewers Called Her Salome

Salome and Judith carry severed heads in different traditions. Judith kills an enemy commander and saves her city. In the New Testament story and its later artistic development, Salome becomes associated with the beheading of John the Baptist. Around 1900, artists and writers repeatedly explored Salome as an emblem of erotic danger.

Klimt's frame gives Holofernes's name, yet some contemporary viewers saw Salome because the woman's sensuality did not fit their preferred image of Judith. The Berlin display of 1905 went so far as to present the painting under the wrong heroine's name.^[1][2]

This was not a simple failure to read. It was a revealing collision between iconography and expectation. A woman with a severed male head, parted lips and self-conscious erotic power activated a familiar fin-de-siècle type more quickly than the inscription could discipline it.

The mistake should therefore be reported historically, not repeated as uncertainty about the current identification. The painting is Judith. Its reception shows why a correctly named Judith could nevertheless be perceived through the cultural image of Salome.

Eroticised Reception and the Modern Viennese Woman

Contemporary criticism returned to Judith's exposed flesh, jewellery, facial expression and apparent cruelty. Reviewers described a nervous or sensuous body and connected the biblical heroine with a recognisably modern Viennese femininity. Some admired the decorative brilliance; others treated sexuality and violence as evidence of moral danger.^[1][2]

Such responses tell us as much about the reviewers' gender expectations as about the painting. A chaste deliverer could be praised within a sacred narrative. A woman who visibly possessed her body, her victory and the viewer's attention was harder to contain.

Klimt did not leave a statement instructing viewers to read Judith as a contemporary social type. The modernity arises from pictorial choices: hairstyle, jewellery, bodily presentation, psychological address and the near-disappearance of historical setting. Critics made those choices socially legible through their own vocabulary.

Reception evidence is valuable precisely when it does not become a verdict. Calling the figure cruel does not prove that cruelty is her essence. Calling her erotic does not remove the political purpose of her act. The conflict among those terms is part of the painting's continuing pressure.

The “Femme Fatale” Question

The phrase “femme fatale” is often used for Klimt's Judith and for a broader fin-de-siècle fascination with women imagined as sexually compelling and dangerous. The Belvedere and Klimt Database use the category to place the picture among turn-of-the-century images of destabilising female power.^[1][2]

It fits several visible features. A living woman dominates a dead man. Sexual address and lethal consequence occupy the same narrow space. Holofernes's reduction can support later readings involving castration anxiety or a battle between the sexes, provided they remain identified as interpretations rather than objective facts.^[1][2]

The category also has a cost. It can turn all female agency into a threat to men and erase the narrative in which Judith's target is an invading commander. The heroine does not kill an innocent lover because female sexuality is inherently destructive. She acts to rescue a community from military conquest.^[3][4][5]

The strongest reading keeps both histories in view. Klimt's audience encountered a modern eroticised victor through fin-de-siècle anxieties. The frame and severed head preserve the sacred-political identity that those anxieties repeatedly tried to rename.

Deliverance, Violence and Agency

Judith's act is violent, and the painting does not make that disappear. The head is present, even though blood, sword and bodily struggle are absent. Klimt aestheticises the aftermath but leaves enough evidence to prevent innocence.

At the same time, the Book of Judith frames violence as deliverance. The heroine acts when civic leadership has reached a crisis. She returns to her community, displays the result and attributes success to divine aid. Her agency is strategic, verbal, religious and political before it becomes physical.^[3][4][5]

Klimt concentrates all those dimensions into a body that does not narrate them. This makes the image unusually open to projection. Viewers can mistake confidence for vanity or physical pleasure for the whole meaning of victory because the community she saves is outside the frame.

The original inscription counters that narrowing. “Judith and Holofernes” restores names and relation. Her hand, his head and the outward gaze then form a triangle of agency: she controls what remains of the enemy, while also controlling how much emotional certainty the viewer receives.

Was Adele Bloch-Bauer the Model?

Adele Bloch-Bauer has often been proposed as the face of Judith. The suggestion gains retrospective appeal because Klimt later made two celebrated portraits of her, and because her features can appear comparable. Some versions of the claim also attach an undocumented affair.^[1]

The Belvedere's current research treats the identification sceptically. The chronology is awkward: the design history reaches back to 1898, before the securely documented portrait commission, and resemblance is not identity. Social circumstances also make a conventional posing session by a young woman from Adele's milieu less straightforward than the popular story suggests.^[1]

None of this proves that Klimt had never seen Adele or could not remember a face. It does mean that the painting cannot be presented as her portrait. A later fame has encouraged viewers to read an uncertain resemblance backwards into a secure name.

The alleged affair is still less stable. A model proposal does not establish an intimate relationship, and an erotic painting is not biographical evidence of one. The responsible conclusion is that Adele remains a historical suggestion, not a documented sitter.

Other Sitter Proposals

The singer Anna Bahr-Mildenburg has also been proposed through facial resemblance and Klimt's cultural circle. Belvedere research finds that case weak as well. Comparison of eyes, mouth or hairstyle cannot recover a sitting record that has not survived.^[1]

A professional model may be more plausible. The Belvedere essay discusses a favoured model possibly identifiable as Josefine Grete Holfeld, sometimes known in connection with Klimt as “Klimt-Gretl”. Even this is offered cautiously rather than as a final identification.^[1]

The range of proposals reveals the problem. A recognisable face encourages portrait logic, while Klimt's practice could transform a model through drawing, memory and revision. The work developed across several years, and infrared evidence indicates changes to the body. There is no reason to assume that a single named woman supplied every visible feature.

No secure model is known. That negative conclusion is not evasive; it is the most accurate account of the evidence. Judith's identity comes from subject, inscription and narrative action, not from a modern sitter's recovered name.

Judith I and Judith II

The later number in “Judith I” points to the separate painting of 1909 now held by Ca' Pesaro. That work is commonly titled Judith II (Salome). It is much taller and narrower, measuring 176 by 46 centimetres, and Venice acquired it at the 1910 Biennale.^[6]

The comparison clarifies why catalogue precision matters. The 1901 Judith is a half-length figure set against abundant gold, with Holofernes compressed at the lower edge and an original frame that names both protagonists. The 1909 painting extends the woman's body through a narrow vertical field and belongs to Klimt's later, more agitated decorative language.^[1][6]

Their shared biblical uncertainty has sometimes encouraged fusion. But a later title containing “Salome” does not transfer that identity backwards to the Belvedere canvas, and the original 1901 frame remains decisive evidence for Judith and Holofernes.

The later painting also explains why retaining “I” can help general readers even when the Belvedere's formal title is simply Judith. The suffix distinguishes objects; it should not suggest that the first work was conceived as part of a series.

From Anton Loew to the Belvedere

Anton Loew bought Judith at the Secession exhibition in 1901. Loew was a physician, sanatorium founder and collector whose acquisition placed the painting in a private Viennese environment almost immediately after its debut.^[1]

After his death, his widow Sophie Loew-Unger inherited the work in 1907. In 1920 it passed through Galerie Moos in Geneva, where Berthe Hodler acquired it. She retained the painting until the Austrian Gallery purchased it in 1954.^[1]

This chain is worth stating carefully because provenance summaries have not always agreed. The Belvedere's current object research supplies the corrected sequence from the first buyer to the national collection. It should not be embellished with uncertain prices or additional ownership claims.

Today the painting is in the Belvedere collection, inventory 4737, and is displayed at the Upper Belvedere.^[1] Its continued union with the original frame is crucial. Canvas, inscription and brass ornament still make the integrated object that confronted Secession visitors in 1901.

How to Look at Judith I

Begin at the top rather than with the famous face. Read the inscription and notice how the frame establishes two names before the image distributes power between them. Follow the rigid outer rectangle into the more fluid lines of hair, hills, vines and jewellery.

Then meet Judith's eyes. Resist deciding immediately that they mean seduction, triumph or exhaustion. Look at how the tilt of her head and the opening of her mouth make a stable half-length pose feel physically charged.

Move down across the collar, exposed breast and translucent covering. Compare the modelled flesh with the shallow gold and repeated pattern. The body does not break free from ornament; it becomes more tangible within it.

Finally, find Holofernes. Notice how long the painting allows a viewer to overlook a severed head. His discovery changes the meaning of Judith's hand and forces the biblical act back into an image that can initially resemble a luxurious portrait.

Why the Painting Still Resists a Single Judith

Klimt made the heroine unmistakable and unstable at once. The frame records Judith and Holofernes. The severed head confirms their story. Nothing in the evidence requires a switch to Salome.

What remains unstable is the relation among virtue, violence and pleasure. Judith can be a devout deliverer without appearing conventionally modest. She can possess erotic power without being reduced to an allegory of male fear. She can control the aftermath of killing without allowing the viewer to call her emotion by one name.

This complexity belongs to the painting's construction. Historical action is cropped. Gold eliminates ordinary distance. Ornament turns ancient source material into modern design. A public heroine becomes a close bodily presence. The viewer must reconcile what the frame says with what period culture expected a virtuous woman to look like.

The result is not an illustration whose story has been forgotten beneath decoration. It is a painting about the pressure exerted by a story when its heroine refuses the visual behaviour assigned to her.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

Accessed August 2026.

1. Belvedere, Vienna, “Judith,” current object record and research essay: title, date, inventory, medium, dimensions, signature, display location, original frame, Assyrian sources, design and infrared evidence, gold chronology, sitter proposals, exhibitions and provenance. View source.
2. Gustav Klimt Database, “The Golden Knight and Femmes Fatales,” Judith I: frame authorship, 1901 Secession display, contemporary Judith/Salome reception, exhibition history and interpretive context. View source.
3. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “The Book of Judith,” introduction: deuterocanonical status, literary character, siege framework and deliverance theme. View source.
4. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Judith, Chapter 8,” Judith's widowhood, standing in Bethulia, challenge to its leaders and declaration of her plan. View source.
5. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Judith, Chapter 13,” Holofernes's drunken vulnerability, beheading, the maid's bag and Judith's return to Bethulia. View source.
6. Ca' Pesaro—International Gallery of Modern Art, Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, “Gustav Klimt, Judith II (Salome),” separate 1909 object, medium, dimensions, inventory and acquisition at the 1910 Venice Biennale. View source.

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