The Lady in the Wall: Klimt's "Portrait of a Lady" Found Where It Was Lost

The painting already carried an extraordinary secret before it was ever stolen. In 1996, an Italian art student named Claudia Maga made a startling discovery: Klimt's "Portrait of a Lady" (1916–17), hanging in the Ricci Oddi Gallery of Modern Art in Piacenza, had been painted directly over an earlier Klimt — "Portrait of a Young Woman," a work not seen since 1912. It was, and remains, the only known "double Klimt". One poignant theory held that Klimt reworked the canvas to cope with the sudden death of the young woman he had loved and painted.

That revelation prompted the gallery to plan a special exhibition celebrating the work — and it was during those preparations, on 22 February 1997, that the painting vanished. The theft baffled investigators. The painting's empty frame was later found discarded on the gallery's roof, next to a skylight — yet the skylight was too small for the framed painting to have passed through it. Police came to believe thieves had lowered a fishing line from the roof, hooked the painting, and pulled it up through the opening after removing it from its frame.

The case only grew stranger. In April 1997, Italian authorities intercepted a high-quality forgery of the painting at Ventimiglia, near the French border, in a package addressed to disgraced former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, who was then hiding from the law in Tunisia. The genuine article remained missing. The investigation was reopened in 2016 after advances in DNA testing offered fresh hope of matching a partial print left on the discarded frame. Estimated to be worth at least €60 million, "Portrait of a Lady" became one of the most coveted missing paintings in the world.

The resolution, when it came, was almost too improbable for fiction. On 10 December 2019, a gardener clearing thick ivy from an exterior wall of the Ricci Oddi Gallery noticed a small metal panel set into the wall. He pried it open to reveal a recess — a cubby similar to a utility-meter box — and inside it a black bag. Within the bag was a painting. Gallery employee Dario Gallinari initially thought the gardeners were teasing him — until he saw a corner of the canvas peeking from the bag. The wax seals and stamps on the back matched those of the missing Klimt, and the ivy over the recess had not been cut back in nearly a decade.

On 17 January 2020, Piacenza prosecutor Ornella Chicca made it official. "It is with no small emotion that I can tell you the work is authentic," she announced. Experts had compared images taken under infrared and ultraviolet light with tests conducted in 1996, and X-ray analysis confirmed the hidden earlier portrait beneath — proving beyond doubt this was the one-and-only double Klimt. Astonishingly, after twenty-three years, the painting was almost undamaged.

But who had put it there, and when? Shortly after the discovery, two men wrote to a local journalist at the newspaper Libertà, confessing they had stolen the painting in 1997 and later returned it "as a gift to the city." Their lawyer said they had placed it back in the wall around 2016 — not immediately after the theft. By then, the statute of limitations had long expired, and prosecutors also questioned others, including the widow of a former gallery director. The theft was ultimately closed as unsolved. On 28 November 2020, "Portrait of a Lady" went back on display at the Ricci Oddi Gallery under high security — recovered, but still wreathed in mystery.