Gustav Klimt: The Epic of The Kiss

Before Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, where a man and a woman embrace in a golden sea and gold overflows from their garments until the air itself glows, time stops at the moment of the embrace and the narrator begins to question what he sees. He asks the man why he leans over her face as if to give her his soul, and the woman why her eyes are closed as if in a long prostration, and she answers that love becomes worship when it is in obedience to God. The gold says it belongs to earth, where it crowns kings, and to heaven, where it gleams in the Throne; the garment reads its squares and circles as the fortress of man and the womb of woman; and the flowered ground says love is a tree that needs roots. The ornaments, the embrace, time and silence speak in turn, until the painting itself calls the kiss a covenant, a sacred pact like the covenant between God and His servants. The narrator leaves knowing that the kiss, once painted, has become a vow, a prayer and the incarnation of love that refuses death.