Music

Gustav Klimt was commissioned to paint the Allegory of Music For the music room of the Dumba Palace in 1898. The room was mahogany featuring gilded bronze, marble walls, a white ceiling decorated with stars and serpentine lines, a head of Medusa over the fireplace, a fire screen with motifs of flames and musical notes, and a general eclecticism rich with symbolic meanings. For this music room Klimt painted two panels to go over the doors that represented a key point. As Klimt’s mother was a musician and his father was a gold engraver, paintings like The Allegory of Music seem entirely natural and even destined to exist within Gustav Klimt’s body of work.