The Kiss

Oil on canvas, 180 × 180 cm, painted by Gustav Klimt between 1907 and 1908, during his “golden period”, when he laid real gold and silver leaf over the paint, an idea he took from the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna he had studied. A kneeling couple kiss on a flowering clifftop, both wrapped in one golden cloak that joins them and cuts them off from the background. It is the most reproduced image of Viennese Art Nouveau, and it hangs in the Belvedere in Vienna.