À l'en-tête d'Holopherne

Résumé En

This essay argues that, in Manhood, the Judith Salome diptych has a deeper and more structuring effect than Cranach's Lucrèce and Judith, even though Le iris himself used the latter in order to frame his autobiographical volume. The Judith I Salome' diptych is composed by the very two figures whose merging Panofsky (he could have mentioned the Judith II (« Salome ») that Klimmt painted in 1911) singled out as one of the most flagrant symptoms of modern ignorance of iconology : for the sexuali^ation of Judith entailed by this coupling is an iconographie blasphemy ; no humanist would have dared equate her patriotic virtue with Salomé' s capricious perversity. But, in Leiris's logic, Holophernes' s beheading is a sufficient ground for retroactively motivating, even if fantasmatically , her sexualization (his Judith is a praying-mantis figure who transforms her lover into an Acephalus) . The present essay, however, argues that, inspite of Leiris's insistence, his identifying with the beheaded Holophernes (or Saint John) is not primarily rooted in sexual fantasies, but in a deeper articulation between the self-portrait as a genre (literary as well as pictorial) and exemplary figures of beheading.