Klimt most likely painted in gold because gold was the family trade: his father was a gold engraver. The mosaics of San Vitale in Ravenna, which he first saw in 1903, came after the gold and later showed him what a flat field of gold does to a human figure.
From about 1900 he laid gold, silver and even platinum leaf onto his canvases. The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer and The Kiss, the peak of that Golden Period, are the best known.
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Ravenna is the part of the story everyone repeats, and it has a problem. Klimt used real gold leaf on a large scale for the first time in Judith I, which he finished in 1901. A year later the Beethoven Frieze, made for the Vienna Secession, carried gold leaf as well. His two trips to Ravenna both came in 1903.
The Belvedere in Vienna, which owns Judith I, dates his fascination with gold to around 1900. The mosaics cannot have given him the idea. I think the gold came from his family, and that Ravenna changed what he did with it. His own words from there show how.
What You'll Discover
What Klimt wrote from Ravenna.
Who in his family worked metal.
Why real gold broke the rules.
How the gold went onto the canvas.