Entering the tent of her enemy general, Judith had every intention of killing Holofernes, though he did not now. She bids him drink and drink and once he fell unconscious, she removed his head. The history of art shows this story of lust and loyalty at various moments: showing her holding a sword before his unconscious form, the bloody moment when blade pierces skin, but most commonly, Judith, victorious, holding his head triumphantly.
Walking through the rooms of the Belvedere Palace, I encountered this celebratory scene of death as painted by a modern master. But first I noticed the group of school children, seated in the middle of the long, dark room, playing games and talking while above them watched Judith.
The room I found myself in was a narrow rectangle, with Judith on the shortest side, next to shuttered windows. The painting, by Gustav Klimt, is small—much smaller than the Gentileschi depiction I saw years ago in an exhibition on Caravaggio and his peers—but small things can be unsettling too, I learned.
Though boxed in a large frame, Judith juts her chin up and looks out at you with disdain. The day I came in, two women were renovating the walls around her so she was contained not just by the thick, golden frame, but also hung behind a small and temporary picket fence.
Despite the obstructions and de facto safeguards, a few feet away from her, I—and the gathered school children—were still under attack.
I could move and the children, as children do, would likely be hopping around the other galleries shortly. We would be fine, however unsettled we were. But Judith has more permanent victims. The first is obvious. Just looking at her, we see that Holofernes' head rests at her hip. That victim is integral to her story and will forever live on in her depictions.
Yet the Belvedere made victims of its other artworks. Her gaze passes over me, over the children, across the benches, across the entirety of the long and popular room to land, like a warning, upon an embracing couple. Klimt's The Kiss hangs directly opposite her.
This other depiction of love—ambiguously riding the lines between comforting, intimate, and purely lustful—is markedly safe. Whatever the emotions that motivate its couple, the two are impassioned, but not violent. But the disdainful gaze across the room speaks to lust gone wrong. Holofernes dies for his desire and Judith draws him in with her sensuality: their tale of sex kills.
Though it is a smaller canvas, with a half-body figure and semi-obscured head, its warning is not reduced. In fact, its size allows the insidious canvas to slip in unnoticed, seemingly separated by the long space of the room, but actually ever present as if hanging next to it.
But perhaps its message is redundant? Perhaps the warning lives in The Kiss already?
Don't all lovers know the dark side of love, feel in their lungs and quickened heart the similarity between rage and lust? The lesson is always there, and Judith merely lives as a reminder, across the way, watching, reminding The Kiss and visitors that flock around it that pain and love reside together in the same parts of the heart—that gold paints love, lust, and loss.