希望之二

Around 1907 Klimt was at the peak of his golden phase in Vienna, layering real gold and platinum leaf onto his canvases the way a medieval icon painter would. Here he turns all that Byzantine splendour onto a subject almost no one else would touch at the time: a pregnant woman, her head bowed and eyes shut. Look just past the curve of her belly and you find a small skull tucked into the pattern, and at her feet three women with lowered heads and raised hands, in prayer or perhaps already in mourning. Klimt first called the picture Vision. The name it carries now comes from a German phrase for pregnancy, being in good hope. He painted expectant mothers more than once, which was close to taboo in respectable Vienna, and he wrapped this one in the same shimmering gold he used for empresses and saints.