A painting was found hidden in a wall of an Italian museum. It was authenticated as a Gustav Klimt work that was stolen from the same gallery in 1997. It was reported that Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady was owned by the Ricci Oddi Gallery of Modern Art in 1925, with only the painting’s frame found on the roof of the museum.
Investigations into the 1917 work, which is worth at about $66 million today, stopped over the next few decades. The break came by chance last month, when a museum gardener clearing ivy from a wall opened a metal access panel and discovered the painting inside. It was put in a plastic bag. Experts finally confirmed that the painting was not fake, and officials in Piacenza where the Ricci Oddi is located announced the news.
"It's with no small emotion that I can tell you the work is authentic," Piacenza Prosecutor Ornella Chicca said. An authenticator in Bologna said the painting is still in very good condition, having only suffered a scratch on an edge, possibly from a silly effort to remove the portrait from its frame. Officials said X-rays aided in the authentication process, showing that Portrait of a Lady had been painted on the top of another portrait.
As for why the painting had been stored within a wall, Anne Marie O'Connor, a journalist who had written about another of Klimt’s paintings, said that the thief knew it would be too difficult to sell the painting during the investigation at that time and perhaps planned to return one day and retrieve it. The portrait has been held in Italy’s central bank during the investigation.
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