The Viennese painter Gustav Klimt most likely painted in gold because gold was the family trade. His father earned his living as a gold engraver, and one of his brothers became a metal sculptor.
The famous mosaics of Ravenna, in Italy, came later. Klimt first saw them in 1903, and they showed him how a figure looks when it stands against a flat field of gold, with no room or sky around it.
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From about 1900 he laid gold, silver and even platinum leaf onto his canvases. The best-known pictures of those years, now called his Golden Period, are The Kiss and the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a Viennese sugar industrialist, nicknamed the Woman in Gold.
A popular account sends Klimt to Ravenna, a city near Italy's Adriatic coast whose sixth-century churches are lined with mosaics. These are pictures assembled from thousands of small cubes of colored glass, many of them gilded.
In that version, the mosaics give him the idea. The dates do not support it. Klimt used real gold leaf on a large scale for the first time in Judith and the Head of Holofernes, finished in 1901, a painting of the biblical heroine who beheads an enemy general to save her town.
His two trips to Ravenna, in May and in November 1903, came two years after Judith, and by then his fascination with the metal dated back to around 1900. So Ravenna was not where his gold began.
Two journeys to Ravenna
For the second journey, Klimt set out on November 28, 1903, with an old friend, the painter Maximilian Lenz. Lenz watched him in front of the mosaics and wrote down what he saw.
What You'll Discover
Which relatives worked in metal.
Why real gold broke the rules.
How the gold went onto the canvas.