Old Italian Art

To see this you have to tip your head back on the grand staircase of Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, where it fills one of the narrow spandrels high above the columns. Klimt painted it around 1891, not yet 30, working alongside his brother Ernst and their partner Franz Matsch on a cycle honouring the great ages of European art. His panel for old Italian art shows a young Florentine man pausing over his book to watch a woman crowned with a golden halo. The gold leaf and the frank, direct gaze are already unmistakably his. The Vienna Secession he would lead, and the scandals that came with it, were still six years away.