Medicine

Klimt was commissioned to paint three ceiling panels for the University of Vienna's great hall, celebrating the triumphs of learning. What he delivered horrified them. His Medicine, finished in 1907, put no confident healers at its centre. Instead a column of naked figures drifts from birth to death, a skeleton among them, while the goddess of health turns her back on us. Professors called it ugly and obscene, and Klimt eventually returned his fee and took the paintings back. In 1943 they were stored for safekeeping at Schloss Immendorf, a castle north of Vienna. As the war ended in May 1945, retreating SS troops set the castle on fire, and Medicine burned with it. We know it now only from old black-and-white photographs and Klimt's surviving studies.