Abstract
At the turn of the 19th century the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt was commissioned to decorate the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. However the three paintings he produced – Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence – were rejected by the university and later destroyed by retreating German troops during World War II. The story of these paintings, and another called Goldfish, illuminates common ground between art and science, and highlights ongoing tensions in the relationships between art, science and society.
Highlights
The city of Vienna underwent a major transformation during the second half of the 19th century
The Vienna Secession movement, led by Gustav Klimt among others, involved artists breaking away from mainstream art organizations and government control to explore the modernist ideas that were emerging in Berlin, Munich and other European cities
The Second Vienna Medical School led by Carl von Rokitansky put Vienna at the center of modern western medicine
Summary
Other prominent physicians in Vienna around this time included the surgeon Theodor Billroth, the clinician Josef Skoda, and the anatomist Josef Hyrtl. Another recruit was Ernst von Brucke, the German physiologist who (with Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Carl Ludwig and Hermann von Helmholtz) argued that all physiological processes can be explained by underlying physical or chemical mechanisms, countering the theory of ’vitalism’ that prevailed at the time (White, 2006). Brucke went on to have a prominent role in the scientific development of the university Among those he trained were Ludwig Mauthner, whose description of the nerve cells in fish (Seyfarth and Zottoli, 1991) has been central to my own research for the last thirty years, and Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. As we shall see, the situation changed when the University of Vienna commissioned Klimt to produce a set of paintings
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