Notes from Vienna
and some thoughts on art and romance
Friends,
Google “most romantic painting of all time” and Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss will pop up first. When I was a college freshman, like many girls who were college freshmen, I Scotch-taped a poster of it to my dorm room wall.
Because I’m in Vienna teaching my graduate students, I was lucky enough to visit the Klimt collection at Belvedere Palace, where I got to see The Kiss. Some art historians believe that the figures depicted in the painting are Klimt and his girlfriend, Emilie Flöge. Other theories posit that they’re Klimt and his muse Hilde Roth, or Eurydice and Orpheus, or the forest nymph Daphne and the god Apollo.
That last theory intrigues me.
Eros, god of love, pierced Daphne with an arrow, leaving her ambivalent to romance. He also shot an arrow at Apollo, condemning him, sadistically, to lust after Daphne forever.
Daphne wanted nothing to do with Apollo. He chased her through the forest until she was so exhausted, she cried out to her father, the river god, to just kill her already, or by some other means destroy her beauty. So her father turned her into a laurel.
Apollo caressed Daphne’s bark, groped around for her heartbeat, yanked her leaves off and wore them in his hair. (Note the leaf crown on the man in The Kiss.) He fashioned weapons from Daphne’s wood. If you will not be my bride, he said, you must be my tree.