Retrato de una dama

This portrait has two stories hidden in it. In 1996 an art student examining it noticed how closely the pose matched a lost earlier Klimt, a young woman unseen since 1912. An X-ray settled it. Klimt had painted the first woman, then painted this one directly over her, and the earlier face is still there under the surface. Months later, in February 1997, the picture vanished from this small gallery in Piacenza during a renovation, and for 23 years it was one of the most famous stolen paintings in the world. Then in December 2019 gardeners clearing ivy from an outside wall of the very same building found a metal panel, and behind it, in a recess, a bag holding the painting. It had apparently spent years hidden a few feet from where it was taken. Klimt made it around 1917, near the end of his life.