Until recently, few people had seen the only self-portrait Gustav Klimt ever painted up close. Height, not exclusivity, has been the constraint: it hangs 60 feet up in the air, hovering above the red-carpeted staircases of the Burgtheater in Vienna. Klimt is young and handsome, wearing a voluminous ruff and an intense expression as he takes in William Shakespeare ’s Romeo and Juliet as performed for Queen Elizabeth at the Globe Theatre . His brother, Ernst stands nearby in red doublet, as does the painter Franz Matsch . In the late 1880s, the three artists created 10 ceiling paintings for the stairwells of the new Burgtheater, a Neo-Baroque building that along with the Opera , Parliament , and Kunsthistorisches Museum formed part of Emperor Franz Joseph ’s grand civic project in the heart of Vienna. The works would establish Klimt’s name. The interior of the Burgtheater. © Reinhard Werner. The paintings were recently painstakingly restored with cotton swabs and purified water following water damage.…