Verum Insights...

In 1901, the Austrian parliament convened its first-ever cultural debate. The subject was the enormous allegoric paintings Gustav Klimt had been commissioned to paint for the ceiling of University of Vienna’s festival hall. “Official outrage session” might more accurately describe the occasion that channeled public fury and saw only the education minister come to Klimt’s defense.

Why all the anger? Most immediately because the three paintings were experimental, profane, and weird. The works were asymmetrical, filled with languid sensual bodies, along with octopus tentacles and snakes, skeletons, and sphinxes. Klimt had been tasked with creating idealized images of Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. He refused, offering abstracted impressions instead.

Reconstruction of the planned assembly of the faculty paintings at University of Vienna. Photo: Getty Images.

The kicker came later that year when Klimt’s proposed professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts was rejected by the government. Not that the Vienna native wanted the post; he repaid his commission fee later telling journalist and friend Berta Zuckerkandl, “I refuse any help from the state, I renounce everything.”

Despite such protestations, Klimt continued to work in a city governed by conservatism and censorship. One way Klimt navigated these constraints and remained forward-thinking was through deploying images from the latest in scientific research.

Four decades on from Gregor Mendel’s experiments with garden peas, the foundations for the science of cells and genetics were being formed. Klimt was obsessed. In Vienna, art and science were mixing, in part through salons that brought together artists, intellectuals, and academics.

At those held by Zuckerkandl, along with her husband Emil, the University of Vienna’s Chair of Anatomy and Pathology, attendees received a crash course in the latest biological discoveries. Gustav Mahler attended, so too Max Reinhardt, and Hans Przibram, who ran a experimental biology lab in the city. In her memoirs, Zuckerkandl wrote of evening gatherings in which professors such as Przibram would share slides of “the microscopic wonders of blood vessels, the epidermis, arteries, and brain neurons.”

Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (1908–09). Courtesy of the Belvedere, Vienna.

Klimt was a good student. He’d read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and attended the lectures of Carl von Rokitansky, the visionary dean of the Vienna School of Medicine. Rokitansky’s breakthrough idea was that where health was concerned, the past effected the present and to find medical truth “one has to go deep below the skin.” For science, this meant descending to the microscopic level to understand the surface. Klimt took this idea and incorporated it into his paintings.

It’s present in The Tree of Life (1909) with ovular cells rising up through the ground and into the trunk of the tree—the motif itself representing the evolution of all forms of life on Earth. The cells appear in Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907) emerging from the swirls of gold to become the air the sitter breathes. Ditto The Kiss (1908) with the woman’s body dappled with differently colored cell-like shapes—one research paper sees red blood cells and points to the microscopic illustrations of the naturalist Ernst Haeckel which Klimt likely saw.

Indeed, it becomes difficult to view Klimt’s circles as anything but evidence of his profound interest in the microscopic. Danaë (1907) offers perhaps the most compelling evidence. In the Greek myth, King Akrisios of Argos locks his daughter in a bronze chamber fearing fulfillment of the prophecy that he will be killed by his grandson.

Klimt captures the moment Danaë is visited by Zeus who appears as a shower of golden coins. The king of the gods is irrepressible and potent and so Klimt marks Danaë’s purple gown with ovaloid shapes filled with wavy lines. They’re blastocysts, clusters of dividing cells made by a fertilized egg, an early stage of an embryo which Klimt encountered through the work of Przibram.

It’s proof not only that Danaë is pregnant and the prophecy is alive and well, but also that Klimt can circumvent censorship on the most delicate of subjects—with a little help from science.