Judith

Painted in 1888 on panel and held at the Museum Georg Schäfer, Böcklin's Judith engages one of the most dramatic episodes of the deuterocanonical Old Testament: the widow Judith who saves her people by seducing and decapitating the Assyrian general Holofernes. The Judith story had been a recurring subject in European painting from Botticelli to Artemisia Gentileschi and Klimt — it concentrated the themes of female courage, erotic power deployed in service of collective survival, and the disturbing conjunction of beauty and violence. In the late nineteenth century, the Judith subject enjoyed a particular revival in connection with Symbolist and proto-feminist readings. Böcklin's panel painting of 1888 brings his mature mythological intensity to a biblical subject, likely exploring the same threshold between the human and the elemental that his pagan figures inhabit.

The panel support gives Böcklin's Judith a harder, more jewel-like quality than canvas would allow. The subject demands careful handling of the psychological moment — Judith's composure or intensity in the aftermath of the act — and the physical contrast between the living female figure and the severed or about-to-be-severed head of Holofernes.