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1793, Louvre Museum, Paris, France. ©JMN/Cover/Getty Images
Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss’, sculpture by Antonio Canova,

35 facial muscles and 112 postural muscles are put into influenced by the style, faces and gold of the Byzantine
action to give a single kiss: exclusive to humankind. The origin mosaics that Klimt admired in Ravenna a few years earlier.
of kissing is estimated to date back about a million years and The figures of two lovers of unknown identity, whom some
is related to mothers’ habit of crushing food in their mouths scholars identify as Klimt and Emilie Flöge, his muse and
and then passing it directly into that of their infants. The companion, overlap and converge in perfect harmony. The
oldest image of a kiss, on the other hand, is on a Babylonian acrome, angular and geometric forms associated with the
relief from 1800 B.C.: exchanged on the lips between a man masculine find balance and completeness in the colorful
and a woman, it documents that, at least since the time of and natural elements associated with the feminine. The
ancient Mesopotamia, kissing was in use among humans in accentuated verticality of the composition symbolizes an
sexual relations and as a sign of friendship. It is not used as a energy that rises from the bowels to the mind, a drive that
romantic gesture everywhere, and some countries even ban in ascending is ennobled to culminate in a kiss on the cheek,
its practice in public, but it exists in a wide variety of forms charged with such love that it illuminates her radiant face,
and meanings and has even had a dedicated international expressing all the life–giving power of eros.
day since 1990. On the other hand, in the purely carnal sphere
Whether it is a peck or French, on the mouth, forehead Henri de Toulouse–Lautrec’s In Bed, The Kiss (1892), a
or lips, it is practiced in all cultures of the world and widely crepuscular artwork created by France’s most celebrated
depicted in art history. Among the most famous depictions is postimpressionist painter during the season of his maturity.
Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907–08), the greatest masterpiece The almost epidermal fusion of the two bodies, the livid colors
of the Viennese Secession. Created in perfect Art Nouveau and dark nightclub atmospheres capture here the deadly
style, immersed in the refined, ethereal and dreamy aspect of eros: this kiss devoid of sentiment, but also of
atmosphere of the Belle Époque, this painting is deeply moralism, unmasks the hypocrisy of bourgeois respectability.

118 Art Protagonist