In the didactic poem The Theogony written in about 700 BC, Hesiod recounts the origins of the cosmos and lays out the genealogies of the ancient Greek gods. He describes Typhoeus as a grotesque, deadly man-god who can reach the stars, flames flashing from his eyes, arms extending east and west across the skies, fingers bearing dragon heads, his lower body composed of gigantic hissing viper coils and his whole body supported by huge wings.
One hundred and fifty years later an artisan decorates a Greek pitcher with a painting of Zeus hurling lightning rods at Typhoeus, this time depicted as a winged creature with a human torso, an animal head, pointy ears, supported by coiled serpent legs.
Nine hundred years later, in 1652, the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kirchner describes Typhoeus as a human-like figure who shoots flames from his mouth, blows wind and clouds from his ears, grows snakes for fingers and feet and is covered in little, slithery snakes.
Another two hundred and fifty years pass and in 1902 Vienna, Gustav Klimt finally breaks the mold: on a wall in the Secession Building, instead of painting a human-like god-monster, he paints a giant, brown, winged ape, two meters tall and four or more meters wide and calls him Typhoeus. Somewhere below the extended blue, grey and beige wings is an intricately patterned (Persian carpet-like) body that ends with snakes uncoiling, their ends reaching upwards.
I have looked far and wide for an explanation for the substitution of an ape for the more conventional depiction of the god but have found nothing convincing. Klimt himself was famously tight-lipped about his inspiration, liking the public to delve into their own unconscious minds to find links to his work. Did he choose an ape because in early Christian art the devil is sometimes depicted as an ape? In Romanesque art the ape represents lust and the pleasures of the flesh. The ape sometimes stands for syphilis, a condition that plagued Klimt himself. Perhaps Klimt saw the vices that threatened his time and chose images, sometimes conventional, sometimes not, that best represented his vision.
The Beethoven Frieze is in the permanent collection in the basement of the Seccession Building in Vienna and the travelling copy is presently on display at the Pinacotheque in Paris.
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