About this work
(also known as *Salomé*) is an oil on canvas painted in 1909, measuring a strikingly elongated 178 by 46 centimetres, and held today at the Ca' Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice.
Where *Judith I* presented the heroine face-on, directly confronting the viewer, here Klimt shows her in profile — body bent slightly forwards, turning sharply to the left, eyes fixed on some distant, unreachable horizon.
The eye is drawn from her distinctive face down to her brazenly exposed chest, then further still to her splayed hands clutching a sack — from the bottom of which the severed head of Holofernes emerges.
The gilded frame remains, but the background of the painting itself has shifted: gold is gone, replaced by a deep, warm orange-red — a signal that after *The Kiss*, Klimt had abandoned gold leaf as his primary decorative device and turned to colour instead.
Against that smouldering ground, Judith's dress seethes with embellishment — elongated triangles, spiral shapes in contrasting shades of grey, enlivened by brilliant floral detail, all culminating in a striped, kaleidoscopic scarf at her head.
Eight years after his controversial *Judith I*, Klimt returned to the same Old Testament figure — a woman who used her physical charms to seduce the Assyrian general Holofernes and then beheaded him to save the Jewish people — because for him and his contemporaries, Judith embodied the femme fatale: eroticism and danger fused into a single form.
By placing Judith in a dynamic, forward-leaning pose, Klimt appears to deliberately invoke Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils — so successfully that the painting was misidentified as *Salomé* for many years.
For this work, Klimt adopted the Oriental *kakemono* format — the extreme vertical — underlining the importance of Japonism to the broader Secessionist project.
The painting debuted in 1910 at the ninth Venice Biennale, where Klimt was given his own dedicated room, and Ca' Pesaro acquired it immediately upon exhibition — a decisively far-sighted purchase.
Where *Judith I* held magnetic fascination and sensuality, this second version abandons warmth for sharper traits and a fierce, unsettled expression — a meaningful evolution in how Klimt understood the figure.
On the wall, *Judith II* rewards a room that can absorb its intensity — a narrow, tall format that commands vertical space without overwhelming it. It suits high-ceilinged interiors with dark
