Church in Cassone 1913 CE

On a summer afternoon in 1913, Gustav Klimt pointed a telescope across Lake Garda and turned a distant Italian village into one of the most tightly patterned landscapes of his career. Kirche in Cassone — also known as Church in Cassone or Landscape with Cypresses — shows the hillside hamlet of Cassone stacked like a mosaic: pale stone houses, terracotta roofs, dark conical cypresses, and the octagonal church that gives the painting its name, all pressed against a sliver of water at the lower edge. There is almost no sky and no conventional horizon. The eye is held on the surface, where architecture and foliage lock together in shimmering greens, greys, and warm reds. The result feels both documentary and dreamlike.

Summer on the Garda Shore

Klimt painted the work in 1913, during a stay of several weeks with Emilie Flöge and her family. They lodged on the Val di Sogno peninsula near Malcesine from late July until mid-September. Cassone lies a few kilometres to the south on the eastern shore of the lake. From a vantage near Villa Gruber at Dosso di Ferri, the village was too distant for unaided study, so Klimt almost certainly used an optical aid — most likely a telescope with about tenfold magnification — to lock the church, the houses, and the trees into a single plane.

The same holiday produced two companion oils: a view of Malcesine itself, later destroyed, and Italian Garden Landscape, now in the Kunsthaus Zug. Because the Malcesine canvas did not survive, Church in Cassone is the only remaining Klimt painting that records the architecture of Lake Garda. The church that dominates the composition is the late-baroque parish church of Santi Benigno e Caro, built in the mid-eighteenth century on the high ground of the village; an older oratory of the same dedication still stands nearby. Cassone itself is a small settlement at the foot of Monte Baldo, known today as much for its short river, the Aril, as for the view Klimt captured more than a century ago.

The Telescope, the “Spinach Landscape,” and a Vanished Holiday Companion

The telescope is the anecdote that most often attaches to the picture. Standing on one peninsula and painting another, Klimt compressed distance until houses resembled children’s building blocks and cypresses became dark punctuation marks. Scholars have compared that stacked geometry to Cézanne and to early Cubism, a language Klimt had encountered in Paris in 1909 and discussed with Egon Schiele.

A more intimate memory belongs to Georges Jorisch, grandson of an early owner. As a child he saw the painting hanging in family rooms connected with the Purkersdorf sanatorium and later nicknamed it the “spinach landscape” because of its dense, dark greens. He last looked at it in 1939. The holiday that produced the canvas had its own shadow: the companion view of Malcesine on Lake Garda disappeared in the wreckage of the Second World War and survives only in photographs, which makes Cassone’s survival feel very lucky.

Pattern Instead of Horizon

Klimt is famous for gilded portraits and allegories, yet from the late 1890s onward he treated landscape as a private laboratory. He favoured the square format because it cancelled the usual division into foreground and distance and turned the canvas into a field of meditation. In Church in Cassone that choice is pushed far: the town rises in orthogonal planes, light and shadow are laid on in tesserae of colour, and the water at the bottom does not open the picture so much as seal it. The houses interlock like the tiles of a Wiener Werkstätte design; the cypresses both conceal and clarify the corners of buildings. Stephan Koja and Alfred Weidinger have read the flattening as Klimt’s answer to Cubism and to Schiele’s townscapes — not blocks of volume, but layers of surface. The painting therefore sits at a hinge in his late work: still lush and decorative, yet already architectural, modern, and strangely still. It carries no religious ritual in the liturgical sense; its “ritual” is looking itself, the conversion of a lakeside village into a self-contained object of contemplation.

Oil, Square Canvas, Signature at the Left

The painting is oil on canvas, signed “Gustav Klimt” at the lower left. Its dimensions are 110 by 110 centimetres, or 43¼ by 43¼ inches. Klimt used that exact square for many of his landscapes so that they could hang together as a consistent series in exhibitions. There are almost no preparatory drawings for these outdoor pictures; unlike the portraits, they were built on the spot from direct observation, then tightened in the studio into the mosaic of strokes visible today. The palette is cool blue-grey stone, saturated greens, and sudden notes of yellow and red on the roofs. The church reads as a large, barely subdivided mass; the cypresses are placed with calculated awkwardness in front of house corners so that the eye is forced back onto the patterned plane rather than into deep space.

From the Zuckerkandl Salon to an Anonymous Sale

Viktor and Paula Zuckerkandl, among Klimt’s most important Viennese patrons, acquired the painting from the artist by 1914. After the couple died childless in 1927 it passed to Viktor’s sister, Amalie Redlich. She still owned it in 1939. Following the Anschluss she paid a shipping firm a large sum to crate and hide her pictures. In 1941 she and her daughter Mathilde were deported to Łódź and never returned. When a relative opened the crates in 1947 they were empty.

The canvas resurfaced in 1962 at an exhibition in Graz, labelled as coming from a private collection. Its later path ran through Galerie Welz in Vienna, Hans Fritz in Gerlitzen, and a Graz collection from 1962 onward. The Graz owners had bought in good faith. After years of negotiation they agreed with Georges Jorisch, Mathilde’s son, on a voluntary private settlement. On 3 February 2010 Sotheby’s offered the work in London. Estimated at 12 to 18 million pounds, it sold for 26,921,250 pounds including premium — roughly 30.7 million euros at the time — a record for a Klimt landscape. Proceeds were shared. The buyer has never been named. The painting remains in a private collection.

What began as a holiday view across a lake ended as one of the most closely watched provenances in Klimt’s oeuvre: a square of patterned light that outlived its first owners, vanished in wartime, and returned to public view only long enough to change hands again.