Ancient Greece and Egypt
Gustav Klimt (1891)
Gustav Klimt’s staircase pair Ancient Greece and Egypt stages two <strong>female allegories</strong> flanking an empty arch: a robed, animated <strong>Athena</strong> to the left and a frontal, nude Egyptian goddess aligned with <strong>Nekhbet’s vulture</strong> to the right. Klimt fuses collection-based citations with <strong>ornamental gold, red, and black</strong> to declare a canon in which Western art passes through Greece’s humanist clarity and Egypt’s sacral permanence <sup>[1]</sup><sup>[2]</sup><sup>[3]</sup>.
