Portrait of a Lady

The Galleria d'Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi describes the picture as oil on canvas, 68 by 55 centimetres, made between 1916 and 1917. It shows a young woman in three-quarter view, dark-haired, against a green ground, in the manner Klimt used in the last two years of his life after he had put aside the gold of his earlier work. The gallery's own note says that by this date his painting had become less precious and had given itself over to almost hurried brushwork, betraying a more emotional approach open to expressionist suggestion.

The size is not settled. The gallery gives 68 by 55 centimetres. The Italian and English Wikipedia entries give 60 by 55. News agencies quoting the museum in January 2020 described a work of about 55 by 65 centimetres. The Austrian agency report of 11 December 2019 called it 40 by 60. A record that is honest about this picture has to say that four figures are in print and that the holding institution's is the one to prefer.

What is not in doubt is what lies under the paint. The gallery states that beneath this portrait is another portrait by Klimt of a young woman identical in face and pose but differently dressed and differently coiffed, that Klimt preserved the background and the face of the underlying picture, and that he then worked decisively on everything else, arriving at a transformation of the first painting that has no equal anywhere else in his work.

The buried portrait is usually called the Backfisch, a German word for a girl in her early teens. The Ricci Oddi gallery says it was known until 1996 only through an image published in a German magazine in 1918. The commentary reprinted in the Italian edition of the Klimt catalogue records that Johannes Dobai wrote in 1967 that the dimensions and the whereabouts of the work were unknown and that it survived only through an illustration in Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte for 1917 to 1918, page 32, with a dating to 1912 by Franz Servaes. The Ricci Oddi gallery itself dates the underlying portrait to about 1910.

So for most of a century the position was this. Art history knew that Klimt had exhibited a portrait of a young girl, had a photograph of it in a magazine, and could not find the painting. It was on the wall in Piacenza the whole time, under another picture, in a room devoted to foreign artists, in a gallery in a provincial Italian city that nobody searching for a lost Klimt had thought to X-ray.

The Austrian Klimt scholar Tobias G. Natter, who compiled the catalogue of Klimt's paintings published by Taschen, told the Austrian press agency in December 2019 that the episode had been, in his words, a little embarrassing for art history. He added that with this work there was truly a disappearing and a finding, a coming and a going.

The person who found the hidden picture was not a scholar. Corriere della Sera reported in December 2019 that Claudia Maga was a final-year pupil at the Colombini art institute in Piacenza, and that she made the discovery in 1996 while preparing her research for her school-leaving examination. In the account she gave at the time and which the paper quotes, she said she was in the library leafing through the pages of a monograph that carried illustrations of both works.

Her method was the simplest available. Corriere reports that she photocopied and enlarged the photographs, then compared them on a sheet of tracing paper on which she had drawn the outline of the vanished portrait, and laid it over the Piacenza picture. The paper quotes her: the face and many other details coincided perfectly, she said, and her heart was in her throat; she told herself to keep calm, that surely some important critic must already have noticed. Nobody had.

The gallery's account credits her with starting the process rather than finishing it. It says that her wish to understand more set off the sequence that clarified the picture's genesis, and that this was then confirmed by the examinations to which the canvas was subjected. IlPiacenza reported in January 2020 that the 1996 discovery was made by Maga together with the gallery's then director Stefano Fugazza, and that the multispectral non-destructive imaging carried out by the research centre Il Cenacolo of Rome had confirmed the under-painting incontrovertibly, both at the time and again in the examination of 2020.

The timing is the cruel part of the story. The discovery made the picture famous, the gallery began arranging an exhibition around it, and the picture disappeared during the preparations.

The Galleria d'Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi states that Giuseppe Ricci Oddi bought the canvas in 1925 from the Milanese dealer Luigi Scopinich. No purchase price is published in the sources consulted. The gallery says he first installed it in the billiard room of the family palazzo, and moved it in 1931 into the gallery, into the room set aside for foreign artists, where the picture led what the gallery calls a quiet existence until 1996.

How it travelled from Klimt's studio in Vienna to a Milanese dealer's stock in the early 1920s is not documented in any source located for this record. Klimt died in February 1918 with a number of pictures unfinished in the studio, and the dispersal of the studio contents and of the late portraits through the Vienna and Milan trade in the following years is exactly the kind of chain that is usually reconstructed from dealer stockbooks. Here it is a gap, and it is recorded as a gap.

The Ricci Oddi gallery is not a converted palace. Its own history states that Giuseppe Ricci Oddi, born in Piacenza in 1869, had been looking since 1913 for premises for his collection, that the negotiations to buy various buildings all failed, and that he decided to have a new building put up at his own expense on the site of the former convent of San Siro, on land given to him free of charge by the city. The architect was Giulio Ulisse Arata of Piacenza, 1881 to 1962, who the gallery says made himself available without a fee, and the building was carried out between 1924 and 1931.

The gallery's account of the design names one feature in particular. Among the innovative functional choices inside, it says, was natural overhead lighting, strongly urged by the founder himself. A museum lit from above is a museum with skylights, and a great deal of what was later said about how the Klimt left the building in 1997 turns on a skylight. The gallery opened to the public on 11 October 1931. Its founder died on 23 October 1937, struck down while out in the street; at his own wish there were no flowers at the funeral and no speeches.

The sitter has never been identified, and this record does not choose a name for her. The Austrian agency report of December 2019 states plainly that who is shown is not known, and that Tobias G. Natter, the compiler of the Taschen catalogue of the paintings, cannot say either. That is the position of the scholar best placed to have an answer, and it is the position this record takes.

One proposal is on the table and it is a proposal only. The same report notes that Klimt's acknowledged companion until his death in 1918 was Consuela Huber, who bore him the first of three children in 1912, that the title Backfisch would almost fit her, since she was fifteen when she became pregnant, and then immediately undercuts the idea: the conspicuous beauty spot on the cheek in the picture is not to be found on any surviving photograph of her. The suggestion is reported, the objection is reported in the same breath, and nothing has resolved it.

A second story circulates in the English-language press and should be handled with care. Artnet News reported in 2016 that the first portrait was supposedly of a love of Klimt's who had died, repainted out of grief. The word supposedly is the reporter's own, and no source located for this record documents the claim.

The January 2020 examination added one physical fact that bears on her. IlPiacenza reported that the investigations showed the woman's face to be the only part of the painting not covered by the later paint, the cheeks excepted. The face on the wall in Piacenza is the face Klimt painted first, around 1910, and left in place when he painted everything else again six or seven years later.

The gallery's own account is the shortest and the most careful. On 22 February 1997, during the laborious phases of preparing an exhibition, it states, the Klimt canvas disappeared, taken by means that the investigations would never succeed in clarifying. That sentence is the gallery's, and it is the safest thing anyone has written about the theft.

The accounts that followed do not agree with each other. The Art Newspaper reported in December 2019 that thieves had reportedly used a fishing line to remove the work from display, and that the frame was later found on the gallery roof. Artnet News reported in 2016 that the painting vanished without a trace while its gilded frame was found abandoned on the institution's roof. The Center for Art Law, writing on the case, records the police belief that the portrait was taken by lowering a fishing line from the roof of the gallery and pulling the painting through the building's skylight, and adds that the frame was later found discarded on the gallery roof.

The Guardian's 2014 report is the most sceptical, and it is the one worth reading twice. It states that in the aftermath of the theft the police appeared flummoxed, that they were unable to say whether the thief or thieves had come in through the main entrance or had used a string and hook to fish the painting through a nearby skylight, and that all that was left was an empty frame with a partial fingerprint. On that account the skylight was one of two competing guesses, not a finding.

IlPiacenza's report of the January 2020 examination describes the frame differently again. Among the marks on the canvas that matched the gallery's file, it lists four scratches corresponding to the frame left on the ground on the day of the theft, and traces of silver colour left by the frame from earlier maintenance work. That is the frame on the floor, not the frame on the roof. The English Wikipedia entry, a tertiary source, adds a further detail that is in fact on the record from the investigating officer: that the skylight beside which the frame was found was too small for the painting to have been removed through it.

Two further facts are agreed. The Austrian agency report states that the picture was taken during renovation work, when the alarm system was not functioning, and that the investigators assumed the thieves had escaped over the roof. Artnet News reported that the theft went unnoticed at first because the chaos of the move provided cover and it was initially assumed the painting had been packed up.

The gallery's summary of the intervening years is blunt: over the years the investigations continued, and there was no shortage of self-styled informants, fantasists, mediums, extortionists and dubious confessions. The documented episodes bear that out.

In April 1997 the border police intercepted at Ventimiglia a package containing what at first sight appeared to be the painting. Artnet News reported that it was quickly shown to be a recently completed forgery. Italian reporting records that the parcel was addressed to the former Italian prime minister Bettino Craxi, then in Hammamet in Tunisia. The case was closed not long afterwards.

It reopened in March 2014. The Guardian reported that more sophisticated testing of the frame had allowed the case to be reopened, and that investigators hoped new results would provide a DNA match with one or more suspects, with the partial fingerprint on the empty frame the only physical trace they had. The Austrian agency report records the same episode from the Italian end, and adds that in 2015 there was a ransom demand, with somebody asking 150,000 euros for information on the picture's whereabouts.

In December 2016 the BBC broadcast an interview with a man who said he had taken the picture. Artnet News, summarising that report, quotes him saying that he stole it months before anybody had noticed, that he had first swapped the Klimt original for a worthless copy with the help of a gallery employee, that nobody blinked and nobody noticed, and that it was an easy and carefully planned inside job; he is reported as saying that he then staged a second, unmissable robbery because he feared the Klimt experts drawn to the coming exhibition would detect the substitution, and that he had quickly sold the painting for cash and cocaine. That is an assertion made to a broadcaster by an interviewee. It was not tested in court, and the investigation that later examined it ended without any finding against anyone. The same report records that the investigations of the time were being run by Colonel Luca Pietranera and that Italian police were said to be pursuing leads connected to a private collection in Europe. Nothing came of it.

The gallery's account of the recovery is as spare as its account of the theft. On 10 December 2019, it states, gardening work was under way along the outside wall of the gallery, and there, in a small recess closed by a door with no lock, a plastic bag was found with a canvas inside it. It was the Ritratto di signora.

The Art Newspaper reported that a gardener employed at the gallery discovered the painting behind a metal plate on an exterior wall, concealed in a bag within a cavity. Artnet News reported that it was found by gardeners clearing ivy from an external wall, hidden in a rubbish bag inside an alcove behind a panel. The Austrian agency report describes two workers cutting back the ivy growing over an outside wall on the Monday afternoon, discovering a door, and behind it a void in which the picture lay in a black rubbish sack. Liberta describes a niche in the external wall of the gallery on via Santa Franca. The Italian Wikipedia entry, tertiary, says three gardeners and a hatch containing assorted rubbish as well as the bag.

The city administration named the finder. In their statement of 17 January 2020, quoted by IlPiacenza, the mayor Patrizia Barbieri and the culture councillor Jonathan Papamarenghi spoke of the joy at the recovery by Mr Mohammed Abrjnaz and his colleagues, and said the work had been carried out by staff performing extraordinary maintenance at the gallery on the city's instructions.

The first person from the gallery to see it said so afterwards. Dario Gallinaro, a member of the gallery's staff, told the Austrian press agency that when the workmen told him they had found a picture in a hiding place he first thought it was a joke, that when he saw the painting he understood at once that it was Klimt's portrait, that he recognised it immediately, and that his hands were shaking as they took it out of the sack; he added that it was the second most sought-after work in Italy after the Caravaggio stolen in Palermo in 1969. The gallery's director Massimo Ferrari told the same agency that the painting still bore its stamp and seal and was in good condition.

The announcement came on 17 January 2020, at the Bank of Italy in Piacenza, where IlPiacenza reports the painting was being held for security reasons. The finding was delivered by three experts appointed by the deputy prosecutor Ornella Chicca, who was coordinating the investigation.

IlPiacenza names the people who presented the analyses: Major Giuseppe De Gori of the Carabinieri cultural heritage protection unit in Bologna; Diego Cauzzi, technology officer of the Pilotta monumental complex in Parma; Anna Selleri, conservation officer of the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna; and Claudia Collina, art historian and critic, an official of the regional heritage institute specialising in cultural property. With them were Serena Pieri, head of the Piacenza flying squad, and the magistrates Ornella Chicca and Antonio Colonna.

The evidence they set out falls into two halves. On the front: the congruity of the artistic characteristics of the painted surface with the artist's execution, his authentic signature, and the pigments he used. Under raking light, IlPiacenza reports, the craquelure, the pattern of the surface crack network, corresponded one hundred per cent with the gallery's record.

On the back, the match was to the gallery's own photograph of the original verso, and to a list of small things. The gallery's stamp in ink on gesso and in sealing wax on the stretcher. The transport labels, the one from the carrier Bruno Tartaglia at upper right torn, and the one at the left from the carrier Ambrosetti for the Roman exhibition Ritorno alla seduzione. The copper anti-theft wires, stuck to the canvas with adhesive tape. The patch of gesso used to take the impression of the seal. Two things were recorded as absent: the exhibition label at upper left and the number 858 on the stretcher. Four scratches matched the frame. Traces of silver colour matched paint left by the frame during past maintenance.

And then the picture underneath. The under-painting discovered in 1996 was confirmed again by the multispectral examination, and it functioned as the thing no forger could have reproduced. General Roberto Riccardi, head of the Carabinieri cultural heritage protection command, had told Corriere della Sera on 11 December 2019 that the discovery of the hidden painting might hasten the outcome of the examination, and that like an ordinary X-ray it would amount to an almost certain signature, a matter of days. It took five weeks rather than days, and it worked exactly as he said it would.

The experts also reported on condition, and their report has a bearing on the criminal question. IlPiacenza states they found the canvas in a fair state of conservation, though it would not have been kept over the twenty-two years in optimal climatic and environmental conditions, and that nothing was revealed about how long it had actually been in that cavity. The Art Newspaper had reported a month earlier that the gallery's vice president Laura Bonfanti said the painting was in excellent condition because it had been protected, and that asked about insurance she said she did not know at that point and that the documents from twenty-two years ago would need to be checked. Whether any insurance was ever paid on the loss, and what happened to it on the recovery, is not published in the sources consulted.

On 21 January 2020 Artnet News reported that two men had written to the Piacenza newspaper Liberta confessing to the theft. It quotes their letter: we are the authors of the theft of Klimt's Portrait of a Lady, they wrote, and we have given a gift to the city by returning the canvas. The report describes them as being in their sixties and as part of a group responsible for a number of burglaries in the area, and says the letter was addressed to one of the paper's reporters, Ermanno Mariani, who had interviewed one of them years earlier during a burglary trial. The Italian Wikipedia entry, tertiary, records that Mariani had published a book about the missing picture in 2018.

Their lawyer put their version on the record. Artnet News reports that the pair's lawyer, Guido Gulieri, told the Guardian that they claimed to have returned the painting four years earlier and had given police the address of a house where they said it had been stored before that, that they had been obscure about the details but had always maintained the painting was not in the cavity all of that time, and that in his view it would have been damaged if it had been there for all those years. The same report notes that the conservation findings, which described the painting as in good condition, are consistent with that claim.

The timing of the confession is not incidental and nobody involved pretends otherwise. Artnet News reports that the confession came more than twenty years after the theft of 22 February 1997, timed to come after the expiry of the limitation period on the crime, and that the two men were facing sentences in a separate burglary case; it quotes them writing that they decided to tip off the public only once they were sure not to incur further crimes, and that they did not foresee the intervention of the gardener, who, they wrote, only anticipated them a little. Their lawyer is quoted saying that it is a very strange story, that they could have sold it or burned it, and that the good news is that the painting has been found.

The Center for Art Law sets out the mechanism. It cites the Italian penal code for a general limitation period of six years for theft from the commission of the offence, extendable to nine where certain circumstances delay the trial, and observes that for a theft in 1997 that window closed between 2003 and 2006, long before the painting was found. On the lawyers' own account of a return around 2015, that too fell outside any prosecution window. The same analysis reports the speculation that the location of the picture was being held as a bargaining chip against unrelated burglary charges and that the gardening staff found it before the men had agreed to give it up.

A second investigation followed the recovery, and it is the part of the story where care is owed to living people. Liberta reported on 3 March 2021 that the Piacenza public prosecutor's office had asked for the case against the three people under investigation for receiving stolen goods and theft to be archived, that the last word lay with the judge for preliminary investigations, that the judge could in theory refuse the request and require the prosecutor to charge one or more of them, and that this was an unlikely prospect. The same report lists the questions that remain open: who took the picture in February 1997, who kept it for almost twenty-three years, and who put it back into a niche in the gallery's external wall on 10 December 2019.

The Art Newspaper had reported in February 2020 that the widow of the former gallery director Stefano Fugazza, named in that report as Rossella Tiadina, had been taken in for questioning by Piacenza police and was under investigation in connection with the robbery with no charges filed, and that the BBC had reported in 2016 that Fugazza, who died in 2009, had written in a diary about the idea that came to him of organising a fake theft of the Klimt just before the opening.

ANSA reported on 18 November 2021 that the judge Luca Milani, at the request of the prosecutor Ornella Chicca, archived the investigation. It names the three: Stefano Fugazza, the former gallery director, who died in 2009, investigated for theft; his wife, whose surname ANSA gives as Tiadima and The Art Newspaper as Tiadina, who ANSA reports died in 2020, investigated for receiving stolen goods; and Valeriano Beltrame, who ANSA describes as having confessed to the theft in an interview and as having then remained silent before the magistrate. ARTnews, citing Italian reporting, stated that prosecutors had dropped charges against three people suspected of involvement in the 1997 theft, that a judge would rule on that decision, and that the case would likely remain cold.

What the archiving means is worth saying plainly, because an archived file is routinely misread as an acquittal or as a conviction depending on who is telling the story. It is neither. It records that the prosecutor did not consider the evidence sufficient to take anyone to trial, and that a judge agreed. No court has found anybody responsible for taking this picture, and no court has found anybody responsible for putting it back. Two of the three people named in the file had died before it closed. This record names nobody as having taken the painting, because no tribunal ever has.

The figures reported around the recovery cluster loosely. The Art Newspaper reported in February 2020 that gallery officials announced in early January 2020 that the work, authenticated as genuine, was valued at 60 million euros. News agency reporting in January 2020 carried a museum estimate of between 60 and 100 million euros. Several English-language reports used a figure of 66 million dollars. None of these is a price. No sale of this picture has taken place since 1925, and no price for that purchase is published in the sources consulted.

The Austrian agency report of December 2019 puts the market question the right way round: the picture is regarded as unsellable precisely because of its fame. That judgment has a practical consequence for the whole story. A canvas that cannot be sold cannot be laundered into a collection, which is why the gallery director's own theory, reported by the Austrian agency, was that the thieves had hidden it in a cavity near the gallery intending to collect it a few days later, and that the press attention and the heavy police presence after the theft left them unable to move it and unlikely to find a buyer.

The market cohort gives the scale without pretending to price this object. Klimt's last portrait, Dame mit Faecher, sold at Sotheby's in London in June 2023 for a hammer price of 74 million pounds, which Al Jazeera reported as about 94.35 million dollars, and 85.3 million pounds including buyer's premium, about 108.4 million dollars. Sotheby's said that after a ten-minute bidding battle between four clients on the phones and in the room the painting had set a new auction record for a work of art in Europe and for Klimt, beating the previous European record of 65 million pounds with premium paid for Alberto Giacometti's Walking Man I at Sotheby's in 2010. That picture is a comparable late portrait by the same painter from the same two years. It is not this picture, and this picture is not for sale.

The painting went back on public view at the Ricci Oddi on 28 November 2020. It then left Piacenza for the first major loan since the recovery: the Museo di Roma at Palazzo Braschi showed it in Klimt. La Secessione e l'Italia, from 27 October 2021 to 27 March 2022, curated by Franz Smola of the Belvedere, Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli of the Sovrintendenza Capitolina and Sandra Tretter of the Klimt Foundation, with more than two hundred works and loans from the Belvedere and the Klimt Foundation. ANSA's report of the archiving in November 2021 notes in passing that the painting was at that moment hanging in that Rome exhibition.

Its first showing outside Italy since the recovery was in Korea. The Korea Herald reported that The Miracle of Klimt and Other Treasures From Galleria d'Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi opened on 19 December 2025 at the My Art Museum in Gangnam, Seoul, co-organised with the Piacenza gallery, with about seventy works from a collection of some seven hundred, and that the Klimt would be shown there until 22 March 2026.

Piacenzasera reported that the picture returned to the Ricci Oddi on 4 April 2026, and quotes the gallery's director Lucia Pini saying that the return of the Portrait of a Lady represented for them a moment of great emotion and profound significance. The return coincides with a rebuilding of the museum around it. The regional heritage service of Emilia-Romagna reports that a refurbishment designed by the Milan studio Lissoni and Partners, begun in spring 2025, covered more than a thousand square metres and all twenty-two rooms, with wall restoration, renewed display fittings, recovered period furnishings, bilingual Italian and English labels and a coordinated graphic system, and that the aim was to free Arata's original design from later and unsuitable alterations. It names Massimo Toscani, the gallery's president, as having led the fundraising from twenty-four local businesses and private supporters, and Lucia Pini as having coordinated the museum side. Free admission ran from 28 April to 3 May 2026.

This record does not publish anything about how the picture is now secured, and the gallery does not either.

Three registers are relevant and none of them currently carries a public entry for this painting, which is what one would expect for a work that has been recovered.

Interpol's Stolen Works of Art database, which the organisation describes as its main tool against the traffic in cultural property and as the only database at international level holding certified police information on stolen and missing art, contained almost 57,000 items at the time of checking. It is not openly searchable: Interpol states that anyone can apply to become an authorised user through its application form, and the search itself sits behind an account. No entry for this picture could therefore be confirmed or excluded from the public side on 26 September 2026.

The Italian national register is the Carabinieri's database of unlawfully removed cultural property, known as Leonardo and run by the Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale. Its public portal describes itself as the largest database in the world dedicated to unlawfully removed cultural property. Major Giuseppe De Gori of that command's Bologna unit was one of the officers who presented the authentication findings in January 2020, which places the command squarely inside this case.

The FBI's National Stolen Art File covers works stolen in the United States or reported to the Bureau. A search of the file on 26 September 2026 returned no entry for any work by Gustav Klimt, and none for this picture.

Version confusion around this canvas is not an accident of careless writing. It follows from the fact that every language that has reported the story has used a different title, and that Klimt used the same generic label for many different sitters.

The holding gallery calls it Ritratto di signora, and so do Corriere della Sera and the Piacenza paper Liberta. English-language reporting is split: The Art Newspaper and Artnet News call it Portrait of a Lady, the Guardian in 2014 called it Portrait of a Woman, and Artnet News in 2016 called it simply The Lady. The Austrian agency report of December 2019 uses Bildnis einer Frau in its text and Portraet einer Frau in its caption, in the same article.

The buried picture underneath has at least as many. The gallery calls it Ritratto di ragazza. The report of the January 2020 examination calls it Ritratto di fanciulla adolescente. Artnet News calls it Portrait of a Young Lady. German writing calls it the Backfisch, which is what Tobias G. Natter called it when he spoke to the Austrian press agency. Italian writing sometimes renders that as La Ragazzetta.

The practical consequence is that a reader searching under any one of these names will be shown pictures that are not this one, and some of those pictures are also by Klimt and also called Portrait of a Lady. This record therefore names the confusable canvases explicitly rather than leaving them to be discovered: the unfinished Portrait of a Lady of 1917 to 1918, the Portrait of a Lady with Cape and Hat of 1897 to 1898, and the Portrait of a Woman of 1893 in Vienna. None of them is the Piacenza picture.

The picture's fame is not the artist's doing. Until 1996 it hung in a room of foreign artists in a gallery of nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian painting in a city of a hundred thousand people. What made it famous was first the discovery of the picture underneath, then the theft, then the discovery in the wall, in that order, over twenty-three years.

The city said as much within hours of the authentication. In their statement of 17 January 2020 the mayor Patrizia Barbieri and the culture councillor Jonathan Papamarenghi said the interest in the painting, always present, had exploded from the date of its recovery; that the bulk of the resources earmarked for the city's art projects for 2020 would be redirected at once to initiatives around it; that work was under way on a book, a novel, to carry the story; and that a number of film directors around the world had contacted the city in those weeks wanting to work on the case. They described the picture as a chance to make Piacenza an obligatory destination internationally.

The audience followed. The picture went back on view at the Ricci Oddi on 28 November 2020. The Museo di Roma exhibition that borrowed it in 2021 sold out and extended its hours in its final days. It then travelled to Seoul, where the Korea Herald reported it was being shown outside Italy for the first time since the recovery, as the centrepiece of a loan of about seventy works from the Piacenza collection. A gallery that could not previously have placed seventy pictures in a Gangnam museum could place them once it had this one.

The 2026 refurbishment is the last step in that sequence. The regional heritage service describes a rebuilding of all twenty-two rooms around a collection that now has an international draw, and the gallery's director Lucia Pini is quoted by Piacenzasera describing the picture's return as a moment of great emotion and profound significance. The museum that the picture was stolen from is now, in a real sense, the museum the picture rebuilt.

The picture belongs to a small group. The Austrian agency report describes it as part of a series of portraits of women that Klimt made in the last years of his working life, between 1916 and 1918. That was the phase after the gold: the Ricci Oddi gallery's own note says that by this date he had abandoned the dazzling gilded stylisations of what is called his golden period, and that his painting became less precious and gave itself over to almost hurried brushwork betraying a more emotional approach, open to expressionist suggestion.

The English Wikipedia article, a tertiary source flagged here for replacement, records that he suffered a stroke on 11 January 1918 which paralysed his right side and died in hospital in Vienna on 6 February 1918, and that numerous paintings were left unfinished at his death. Portrait of a Lady is not one of the unfinished ones, and the distinction matters for this record: a separate, genuinely unfinished Klimt of 1917 to 1918 also carries the title Portrait of a Lady and is a different canvas entirely.

The habit that made this picture possible was his own. Reworking, scraping back and painting over is common enough in any studio. What is not common is doing it to a finished, exhibited, published portrait, keeping the sitter's face and the background, and producing a second public picture on the same support. The gallery states flatly that the transformation finds no equal in any other work by the artist. One canvas in Piacenza holds two Klimts, and only one of them can be seen.