Old Italian Art

Old Italian Art is one of the spandrel or lunette paintings Klimt executed for the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in the late 1880s, as part of the large decorative commission he shared with his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch under their artists' company. The Kunsthistorisches Museum project was the most important public commission of Klimt's early career and the work that established his reputation in Vienna before the founding of the Secession. Each spandrel personified a distinct epoch or national tradition of European art history — Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece, Italian Renaissance, Roman, and others — with allegorical female figures as the vehicle of the personification. The programme required Klimt to synthesise his academic training with deep research into the visual conventions of each era he depicted, producing a kind of art-historical anthology in paint. Old Italian Art, representing the pre-Renaissance tradition, would have drawn on Klimt's knowledge of Byzantine and medieval Italian painting, giving him his first serious engagement with the flat, gold-ground conventions that would later shape his own mature decorative style. The Kunsthistorisches Museum project was completed to considerable official acclaim, earning Klimt imperial recognition.

Executed in oil on plaster in the academic historicist manner, the spandrel employs a warm, richly coloured palette with smooth blended modelling suited to the public architectural context. Archaic or Byzantine iconographic details are introduced into the figure's costume and attributes to signal the specific historical tradition being personified.