Medicine 1898-1907 CE

Gustav Klimt’s Medicine is one of the great missing paintings of European modernism: a vast, unsettling allegory of birth, suffering, eros, and death, painted for the ceremonial hall of the University of Vienna and never installed there. Instead of celebrating doctors as conquerors of disease, Klimt showed humanity drifting in a vertical current of naked bodies while Hygieia, the goddess of health, stands apart, offering a snake a drink from her bowl. First shown in 1901, the canvas became a public scandal, then a private treasure, and finally a wartime casualty. What survives today is a ghost of the original: photographs, drawings, one precious color fragment, and recent reconstructions that try to give the lost work back its color.

A State Commission That Turned Into a Ten-Year War

In 1894 the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Education asked Gustav Klimt and Franz Matsch to decorate the ceiling of the new Great Hall of the University of Vienna, a Ringstrasse palace designed by Heinrich von Ferstel. Matsch was to paint a central allegory of light triumphing over darkness and the faculty of Theology. Klimt was assigned Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. The first designs were conventional enough to be accepted. By the time Klimt began the large canvases in earnest, he had helped found the Vienna Secession and abandoned historicist allegory for a darker, more personal symbolism.

Medicine took shape between about 1898 and 1907. Klimt revised it repeatedly. An early oil sketch was shown to a university commission in 1898. The large painting itself was first exhibited at the tenth Secession exhibition in March 1901. He continued to alter the gold ornaments and Hygieia’s headdress until a final state around 1907. Philosophy had already provoked a petition from university professors in 1900. Medicine caused a still louder uproar. Conservative politicians attacked the education minister, the issue reached parliament, and a public prosecutor was consulted over alleged obscenity. Eighty-seven faculty members protested the idea of hanging the work in the university. In 1905 Klimt broke the contract, repaid his advance, and bought the paintings back rather than surrender them to a state he no longer trusted. 

The Painter Who Sat in the Dissection Room

The scandal is sharper because Klimt was not a stranger to medicine. He moved in the circle of the Second Vienna Medical School. The anatomist Emil Zuckerkandl, husband of the critic and salon hostess Berta Zuckerkandl, invited him into the dissection rooms on Währinger Strasse and gave artists lectures on cells, embryos, and microscopic structure. Berta later wrote that her husband spoke to painters at Klimt’s request and that the experience enriched Klimt’s palette. Friends remembered him drawing for hours in the anatomy hall. Emil was one of the few professors who signed a counter-petition in Klimt’s favor. His brothers Otto, a prominent urologist, and Victor, an industrialist and collector, belonged to the same world; Klimt later painted several of the women in the family.

Berta Zuckerkandl also recorded the artist’s fury when the affair ended. In a rare 1905 interview he told her he would return the state’s money and keep the pictures, because he wanted nothing more to do with officials who stood so far from genuine art. The remark has become one of the defining statements of his break with public patronage.

Why Vienna Could Not Forgive the Picture

Around 1900 Vienna was a capital of both experimental medicine and experimental art. In Medicine the “stream of life” on the right is a packed column of nudes of every age: infants, a heavily pregnant woman, wrestling men, crouched figures, the old, and a skeleton. On the left a single floating nude, often read as Life itself, reaches across a band of pale mist toward that current; a newborn lies near her feet. Below stands Hygieia, daughter of Asclepius, the only figure who meets the viewer’s gaze. She holds a bowl from which an Aesculapian snake drinks. Critics said she turns her back on the suffering she is supposed to heal.

Contemporaries expected prevention and cure. Klimt offered fate, erotic flesh, and the cycle from becoming to passing away. A medical weekly complained that he had ignored the two great achievements of the profession. Karl Kraus mocked the picture as the chaos of a state hospital. Others called it pornographic and unfit for a university ceiling. 

Supporters saw instead a modern allegory that treated the body with a frankness new in public art and that placed medicine inside the larger mystery of life rather than above it. The painting thus became a battlefield over what official culture was allowed to show: triumphant science, or the vulnerability science could not abolish.

The work also marks a turning point in Klimt’s own art. The floating nude, the gold-clad priestess, and the densely overlapping bodies look forward to the so-called Golden Period. 

Canvas, Gold, and a Ceiling That Never Received It

Medicine was an oil painting on canvas, with gold leaf added in the later versions, especially around Hygieia. The finished work measured approximately 430 by 300 centimeters (about 169 by 118 inches), a size meant to be read from below as part of a ceiling cycle. Klimt prepared it with hundreds of drawings and several painted studies. One compositional oil sketch from 1897–98 measures about 75 by 55 centimeters (roughly 29.5 by 21.7 inches). Transfer sketches and nude studies in the Albertina show how long he hunted for the pose of the floating woman on the left.

Almost no color record of the large canvas survives. The exception is a collotype of the Hygieia detail published in Max Eisler’s 1931 portfolio Gustav Klimt. Eine Nachlese, printed at about 48 by 46 centimeters (19 by 18 inches). It shows the goddess in glowing red and gold with a floral headdress that replaced an earlier laurel wreath. Everything else known of the original comes from black-and-white photographs, including images by Moriz Nähr, and from those preparatory works.

From the Ministry’s Ledger to a Castle Fire

After Klimt repaid the state in 1905, August Lederer helped finance the buyback and received Philosophy. Between 1910 and 1912 Koloman Moser acquired Medicine and Jurisprudence. In 1919 the Moser family sold them. Medicine entered the Österreichische Galerie, today’s Belvedere, with help from patrons; Jurisprudence went to the Lederers. After the Anschluss of 1938 the Lederer collection was seized because the family was Jewish. During the war all three faculty paintings were stored for protection at Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria. On 8 May 1945 the castle burned. Retreating SS units are widely believed to have set the fire so that the art would not fall to the Red Army. The canvases have never been seen again.