Hygieia (Detail from Medicine)

Gustav Klimt

Oil on canvas

Österreichische Galerie Belvedere

This work depicts Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health and hygiene, as the dominant foreground figure in Klimt's monumental faculty painting Medicine, commissioned for the ceiling of the University of Vienna's Great Hall. Hygieia stands with the Aesculapian snake coiled around her arm and the cup of Lethe in her hand, her back turned to the suffering humanity massed behind her — a column of nude figures, a floating woman, and a skeleton representing the river of life and death. Klimt, a co-founder of the Vienna Secession and a leading figure of Symbolism and Art Nouveau in Austria, rendered the goddess in his characteristic ornamental style, her robes richly encrusted with gold and decorative patterning while the vulnerable human forms behind her remain unadorned. The painting provoked fierce controversy upon its 1901 Secession Exhibition debut, as critics and university faculty alike condemned its refusal to celebrate medicine's triumphs, and the full work was ultimately never displayed in the university.