Florença do Cinquecento e do Quattrocento

This panel is the work of a young Gustav Klimt, still in his twenties and years away from the gold and the scandal that would make his name. In 1890 and 1891 he belonged to a painting firm he ran with his brother Ernst and a friend, decorating the grand new buildings along Vienna's Ringstrasse. For the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum they filled the narrow spaces between the columns with figures standing for the great ages of art. This one honours Florence in the 15th and 16th centuries, and Klimt paraphrases its heroes, nodding to Botticelli's Venus and to Michelangelo without copying either outright. The panels were painted on canvas in the studio, then glued straight onto the walls about six months before the museum opened.