The Lady in Gold by Anne-Marie O'Connor

“Neither did anything without the consent of the other,” grumbled the historianProcopius, who defamed Theodora as a power-hungry concubine. Theodora began to push for laws that eroded the chattel status of women. She fought the widespread kidnapping of women into prostitution. She pushed for laws against rape, for women’s rights to hold property and to inherit. Theodora was credited with helping to elevate the legal status of women to unprecedented levels. She herself became one of the most powerful women in the Byzantine Age.
    TheEastern Orthodox Church made unlikely saints of this powerful couple, granting Theodora the immortality beheld by Klimt as he stood before her. These “mosaics of unbelievable splendor” were nothing short of a “revelation,” Klimt wrote.
    This was the image that scholars suspect was the inspiration for Klimt as he began to plot his golden portrait of Adele as a painted mosaic, and his subject as a fallen icon.

“Degenerate Women”
    The ongoing portrait made Adele and Ferdinand full partners in theSecession. It put Adele in the company of some of the most remarkable women of her time: art patronesses, journalists, and intellectuals. Adele had a haven from the confines of her sheltered family life, in a milieu in which she could freely exchange ideas about such things as Freud’s theories that human consciousness could be broadened by examining unconscious dreams and fantasies.
    Adele was immersed in a serious program of study, reading philosophy and political texts. Every morning after Ferdinand headed to the sugar factory at the castle town of Bruck an der Leitha, Adele sat down to devour classic works of French, German, and English literature. She studied art, medicine, and science. Removed from the enforced conformity of university classrooms in which women were still unwelcome, Adele began to develop a highly individual point of view. She came to believe that insight could not be taught, but had to be discovered through a personal quest similar to Klimt’s artistic “
voyage intérieur.
”
    â€œYou cannot receive knowledge or high literacy from a High School education, nor from University professors,” Adele would write years later. “You have to proceed with open eyes and an iron will to become thoroughly educated.
    â€œOnly the person who places the highest demands on himself can progress one step further,” she believed. “Self-satisfied individuals are incapable of development.”
    Adele’s association with Klimt propelled this intellectual journey by making Adele a member of an elite sorority.
    One of Klimt’s allies wasBerta Zuckerkandl, a young journalist whose salon of artists and intellectuals hosted the first conversations “by asmall group of moderns” that led to the creation of theSecession. Berta considered Klimt a “great man” who lived by “the truth of his own soul.”
    Berta was a woman with unusual clout. She was the daughter ofMoritz Szeps, the Viennese newspaper editor who had been a confidant of the ill-starred crown prince. As a teenager, Berta had traveled with her father, meeting Disraeli and future French prime ministerGeorges Clemenceau, whose brother Paul would marry her sister Sophie. Berta, a keen observer of political and cultural currents, was becoming known as the “Viennese Cassandra.”
    Berta was married to Emil Zuckerkandl, a pioneering anatomist at the University of ViennaMedical School. Emil was then arguing for the admittance of women to the school of medicine. The school dean, however, had a different view. He said that Emil, “as an anatomist, should know perfectly well that women’s brains were less developed than those of men.”
    Berta and Emil privately rolled their eyes and snickered. But the school administrators were deadly serious.
    Emil cleverly pronounced that female doctors had become a matter of imperial urgency.