The Theatre in Taormina

A Sicilian performance above a Viennese staircase

Gustav Klimt's The Theatre in Taormina, or Das Theater in Taormina, belongs to the ceiling decoration of Vienna's Burgtheater. Created in 1886–88 for the northern staircase, it is an oil painting on prepared plaster, not a portable canvas. A dancer, musicians and reclining spectators occupy a luxurious terrace overlooking a pale coast. The setting invokes antiquity in Sicily; it is not a portrait of the nineteenth-century Austrian court.^[1]

The title may initially seem surprising because the closest figures are not arranged inside a crowded auditorium. Klimt brings an intimate performance forward and leaves the larger setting in the distance. The viewer must look past a garden, balustrade and steps towards the coastal architecture. Theatre becomes a subject within a broader image of cultivated leisure, music and display, rather than a diagram of an ancient stage.

The decorative compartment is part of the experience. Its sides swell outwards and return to narrower upper and lower sections. Within that outline, the painted terrace opens onto an expansive view. The picture is simultaneously contained by an elaborate architectural border and drawn towards distance. Seen overhead in a staircase, it offers a succession of discoveries rather than a single figure isolated against an empty ceiling.

The dancer and her audience

The light body of the dancer occupies the lower-left part of the scene. Her raised arms carry a length of pale fabric above and behind her head. That gesture lengthens the body and makes an open loop against the more compact figures nearby. She does not stand at the geometric centre of the entire compartment, yet she commands the closest human action. The pale figure against a darker carpet is more immediately legible than many of the smaller figures farther away.

Beside her, a seated musician raises a double pipe towards her mouth. Behind this player, another woman in red holds a round tambourine overhead. Their positions create three different levels: seated body, upright dancer and raised instrument. The musicians' arms also send the eye towards the dancer, making the group feel connected without requiring every figure to face in exactly the same direction.

The veil is important because it extends the movement beyond the dancer's anatomy. Its slight, pale shape can cross darker passages without becoming another heavy mass. Nearby, the red garment and patterned carpet carry stronger colour. This contrast makes the fabric above her head look comparatively weightless. Its relationship to the arms suggests movement, but the painting does not identify an exact dance or preserve a sequence of steps that could be reconstructed.

On the right, reclining figures establish a slower rhythm. A light draped body stretches horizontally, while a seated man's darker torso rises behind it. The low couch and its coverings create a broad counterpart to the upright dancer. The performance is therefore not presented in isolation. It is watched from within a setting of comfort and possession, where human bodies, textiles and furniture occupy different but overlapping spaces.

No secure identification is needed to appreciate that contrast. Calling the seated man an emperor would turn a pictorial role into a biographical claim. His function is clear enough through placement: he belongs to the group receiving the performance. Likewise, the dancer's exposed body is part of an imagined classical scene, not evidence that she represents a named woman in Klimt's circle.

The winged statue and the terrace

Above the living figures stands a dark winged statue carrying a wreath. Its raised arm answers the dancer's upward gesture, but its silhouette has a different force. The outspread wing cuts firmly into the pale background, while the body remains attached to a tall pedestal. Motion is represented twice: through the dancer's flexible body and the statue's permanently arrested action. The one appears responsive and changeable; the other remains rigidly elevated.

The pedestal also mediates between the foreground and the buildings. Its rectangular base and tall face belong to the terrace's geometric order, while the dark figure above connects it with the open sky. Describing the figure as a winged Victory is consistent with the related working material. It should not be mistaken for a Christian angel simply because it has wings, or made into a prophecy about the dancer's fate.

To the right, substantial columns and projecting architectural details create a dense vertical boundary. Small figures and sculptures appear at several heights. Some occupy the terrace; others belong to niches or elevated positions. The differences of scale invite comparison with the foreground group. What looks dominant nearby can become a minor incident higher up or farther back, and the architecture keeps offering new ledges on which attention can settle.

The paving supplies another kind of movement. Its angled lines pass behind and between the figures, directing the eye across the terrace. Steps then lift that movement towards the balustrade. These devices create depth without a clear road disappearing through the centre. The viewer's path is repeatedly interrupted by bodies, furniture and the statue. Space is lavishly supplied, but it is never simply vacant space.

On the opposite side, the pine's curved trunk and broad crown counter the weight of the building. Its branches reach into the pale upper field instead of enclosing it completely. Below, flowering growth softens the hard divisions of the terrace. Architecture and vegetation do not merge into an indistinct decorative pattern: their differing outlines help organise the picture. The relatively quiet sea and distant shore then offer relief from the crowded foreground.

Painting for a modern theatre

The Künstler-Compagnie—Gustav Klimt, Ernst Klimt and Franz Matsch—received the staircase commission in 1886. The programme traced theatre history from antiquity to the eighteenth century. Gustav executed four of the ten ceiling paintings, including this northern-staircase scene; the others were divided between his brother and Matsch.^[1] This decorative programme belonged to a modern Viennese theatre imagining the history of its own art, not the surviving decoration of an ancient Sicilian building.

That purpose helps explain the mixture of historical reference and staged abundance. The picture invites belief through convincing bodies, furnishings and architectural detail, but it remains a nineteenth-century construction of antiquity. The Klimt Foundation relates the commission's historical imagery to Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Waterhouse.^[1] This is a useful artistic comparison, not proof that the Taormina composition copies one particular painting by either man.

The work also differs from Klimt's Auditorium of the Old Burgtheater. That separate image documents a Viennese interior and its audience. Here the people are participants in an imagined ancient world, painted for the building that replaced the old theatre. Keeping those functions distinct matters more than grouping both works under a general claim about Klimt's early realism.

The ornate surround belongs to the ceiling's larger architectural presentation. It gives the painted scene the appearance of a carefully shaped opening, but the outline need not become a symbolic keyhole. Nor do painted carpets, marble effects or golden-looking details establish that the picture contains those physical materials. Its illusion of richness is an achievement of painting within architecture, not an inventory of precious substances embedded in the figures.

The surviving cartoon fragment

ALBERTINA preserves a large fragment of the cartoon for Theatre in Taormina: Victories and a Male Statue, inventory 47650, catalogue number GKZ3899. Dated 1886–87, it measures 254 × 140 centimetres and consists of black chalk on wrapping paper, with perforated outlines.^[2] It is working material for the decorative painting, not a detached section of its coloured plaster surface.

The perforations make the relationship between drawing and execution unusually concrete. An outline could be prepared on paper at a scale appropriate to the architectural task and made available for transfer. Such a fragment records more than the search for an attractive pose. It belongs to the practical problem of carrying an image from a drawing surface into a building. Its size also challenges the idea that Klimt's preparatory drawings must always be small, casual sketches.

The current catalogue records its discovery in the Burgtheater attic in 1990 and its inventory transfer from the Bundestheater-Holding to ALBERTINA on 5 April 2018. It also records a 2009 presentation in the theatre's Angelika Prokopp Foyer.^[2] Those events concern the paper fragment. They are not dates when the ceiling painting was rediscovered, sold to another museum or removed from its staircase.

The Foundation also distinguishes an 1886 preliminary study in private ownership from the completed painting.^[1] A colour design, a perforated cartoon and the final architectural surface have different purposes. They should not be collapsed into one object with a shared medium or set of dimensions. The surviving fragment offers a particularly valuable link between planning and execution without requiring a claim that every preliminary stage has survived.

Historical photographs and the view from below

Wien Museum holds an albumen photograph of this ceiling painting, dated around 1890, by an unidentified photographer. Its inventory number is 95340/45.^[3] The photograph documents the completed decoration; it is not an autograph Klimt drawing. Its own paper and cardboard support belong to the photographic object, not to the ceiling's material description.

Photography allows a viewer to study a ceiling composition as though it were upright and close at hand. That is useful, but it changes the encounter. In the theatre, the architectural outline, the distance overhead and the movement of a visitor on the stairs all affect how the scene is seen. A reproduction may make tiny figures seem as readily available as the dancer, although their visibility in the building is very different.

The main relationships survive that change of scale. The dancer's raised gesture, the dark statue and the heavy right-hand architecture remain clear. Smaller incidents, however, unfold more slowly. Looking first at the large divisions and then at the details is a way of preserving something of the ceiling's hierarchy even when viewing it on a page. Not every visible ornament needs to be assigned an independent symbolic meaning.

Visiting the painting today

As consulted on 23 October 2026, the Burgtheater's general guided-tour page includes the ceremonial staircases and their paintings by the Klimt brothers and Matsch.^[4] This is the appropriate starting point for planning access. It is not the same as admission to a conventional picture gallery, and the building's working-theatre requirements can affect what a visit includes.

The theatre also advertised special close-range scaffold visits during renovation, with a summer 2026 announcement extending dates into mid-August.^[5] That announcement should not be read as a guarantee of the same arrangement in autumn 2026. Visitors should check the current programme rather than assume that a temporary elevated viewpoint remains available.

Whether seen from below or in reproduction, the painting rewards attention to the balance between performance and spectatorship. The dancer animates the near space, the winged statue gives it a vertical axis, and the distant coast opens the scene beyond the terrace. Klimt has not merely supplied a historical backdrop. He has arranged a sequence of looking, movement and repose for people entering a theatre of their own.

References

1. Klimt Foundation, “Theater Painter in the Crown Lands and Vienna,” Imperial-Royal Hofburgtheater section; commission, attribution, dates, oil-on-plaster technique, separate preliminary study and completed-painting photograph. . Accessed 23 October 2026. View source.
2. ALBERTINA, “Fragment des Kartons zu ‘Theater in Taormina’ für das Burgtheater: Victorien und männliche Statue,” GKZ3899, inventory 47650; current catalogue updated 21 September 2026, metadata and expanded provenance/exhibition history. . Accessed 23 October 2026. View source.
3. Wien Museum, ceiling photograph of “Theater in Taormina,” inventory 95340/45; around 1890 photographic record and separate support. . Accessed 23 October 2026. View source.
4. Burgtheater, “Führung durch das Burgtheater”; current published staircase-tour scope. . Accessed 23 October 2026. View source.
5. Burgtheater, “250 Jahre Burg”; October 2025 renovation/scaffold announcement and July/August 2026 extension notice. . Accessed 23 October 2026. View source.