Medicine

Medicine was the second of the three University of Vienna ceiling paintings that generated the most sustained scandal in Klimt's career. Commissioned in 1894 to decorate the great hall's ceiling alongside Philosophy and Jurisprudence, the three paintings were not delivered in their final form until 1907 and were never permanently installed. Medicine, exhibited publicly in 1901, depicted a column of human bodies — sick, aged, and dead — floating in a dark void, with Hygieia, the goddess of health, indifferent at the right edge. The University's faculty of medicine formally protested to the Ministry of Education, arguing the painting failed to represent medicine as a rational, progressive science. Eighty-seven professors signed a petition against Klimt's entire series. The controversy became a defining moment in Viennese cultural politics, setting the ideals of liberal artistic freedom against institutional conservatism. Klimt eventually bought the paintings back from the state in 1905 rather than accept government censure. All three University paintings were destroyed in a fire set by retreating SS forces at Schloss Immendorf in 1945 and survive only in black-and-white photographs and colour studies.

Known primarily through photographs and preliminary studies, Medicine was executed on a large canvas in Klimt's early Symbolist style, combining nude figures modelled in his characteristic smooth, sensuous manner with richly ornamental passages. The column of bodies rising through dark space anticipates the compositional strategies of his later allegorical works.