Gustav Klimt is perhaps best known for his painting The Kiss (1907-1908) – a famous, iconic work symbolizing intimacy, selfless love and romance. Klimt painted Danaë in the same year, a Secessionist painting depicting the mythological story of Zeus' impregnation of Danaë, the beautiful daughter of King Akrisios. In the painting Danaë is nude, reclining with a shower of golden coins/rain between her legs. This shower, said to symbolize Zeus and the act of impregnation, runs down the left side of the canvas. Prominently featured in the foreground of the painting is something harder to decipher – a flowing purple gown with circular, bi-morphic forms. Art historians assigned these disks a purely ornamental function, but Gilbert, who studies embryological changes, recognized these forms as embryonic cells, specifically mammalian blastocysts. Could it be that Klimt was aware of blastocysts, described for the first time in the 1880s? Gilbert offers compelling evidence to support that he was and intriguing insight into the allegorical nature and meaning of the painting.