Changing tack

Gustav Klimt first came to Venice in the spring of 1899, in pursuit of Alma Schindler, the young stepdaughter of his friend and fellow artist Carl Moll. The nascent love affair between the artist, who was then in his late thirties, and the 19-year-old Alma was brought to an abrupt end when the girl’s mother read her diary and Klimt was asked to leave. Three years later she married Mahler. But before Klimt departed from Venice, Klimt and Alma had visited San Marco where, as Alma recorded, the Basilica’s mosaics, glittering in the half-light, made a profound impression on him.

Although he had experimented with gold-painted highlights in his ‘Pallas Athene’ of the year before, the Venice visit, according to Alfred Weidinger of the Belvedere in Vienna and the curator of this evocative exhibition, stimulated Klimt to make lavish use of the gold leaf that was to become the trademark of his ‘Gold Period’.