My recent reading about Gustav Klimt has led me to spend some time looking at images of the Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna that Klimt visited (twice) in 1903, at trip that may have reinforced Klimt’s use of gold paint and complex ornamentation.
With the mosaics in Ravenna, I was particularly struck by the strategy for portraying the human body under water, in a mosaic showing Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist.
Cropped from an image by blu_blue, which was published under an Attribution-Non-commercial-Share Alike Creative Commons license
Thus the collaged image above, in which I tried to reproduce the effect.