Missing for over two decades, a portrait by Gustav Klimt returns to public view in a major exhibition focused on the Vienna Secession in Rome.

Galleria di Moderna Ricci Oddi, in Piacenza, has loaned to Klimt: The Secession and Italy its prized Bildnis einer Frau (Portrait of a Lady). The recently-restored Klimt masterpiece from 1916-17 was stolen 22 years ago and remained missing until December 2019 when a gardener discovered the painting by chance in a sack wedged inside the ivy-covered exterior wall of the museum building from which it disappeared.

With the Portrait of a Lady loan as a centerpiece, Museo di Roma in the Palazzo Braschi explores the Vienna Secession in the massive exhibition on view now through March 2022. Over 200 works by Klimt and his circle are shown together, including Klimt's iconic Judith I , Lady in White, Amiche I ( Le Sorelle ) (1907), Amalie Zuckerkandl (1917-18) and The Bride (1917-18), which has left the Klimt Foundation for the first time, as well as works by Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, Carl Moll, Johann Victor Krämer, Josef Maria Auchentaller, and more.  

In 1997, just before the work went missing, Italian art expert Claudia Maga noticed that elements of Portrait of a Lady resembled an earlier Klimt, unseen since 1912, entitled Portrait of a Young Lady. A subsequent X-ray of the portrait revealed an underpainting. Forbes reports: "Some furious biographical digging resulted in the story: Klimt was in love with the young lady, and had largely finished the work, but she died. He returned to the painting and attempted to paint her out, and he did succeed in removing her hat and shawl, but he was unable to bring himself to remove the expression in her eyes, or the passion with which he had painted her."

Beyond the heartwrenching story of the hidden underpainting, the portrait's secret of its theft still looms. A local art thief, granted immunity, claimed that the painting—when noticed as stolen—was actually a copy. The thief said in an unproven story that his theft was "to protect the copier, who was a Galleria 'insider.' The real Portrait of a Lady was allegedly stolen months earlier, by the carabinieri informer (again, only according to him), and had been replaced with that copy," reports Forbes. 

Another noteworthy section of the Rome exhibition explores lost ceiling panels known as Faculty Paintings - Medicine, Law and Philosophy - destroyed in a 1945 fire at Immendorf Castle in Austria. These works have been recreated through a collaboration between Google Arts & Culture Lab Team and the Belvedere Museum in Vienna.

"These are allegories made by Klimt between 1899 and 1907 for the ceiling of the Aula Magna of the University of Vienna and rejected by the latter as considered scandalous," the museum's website states. A few black and white photographic images, a partial color lithograph, and newspaper articles were all that remained to digitally reconstruct the color panels, with the Google team using Machine Learning and input from Dr. Franz Smola, curator of the exhibition and one of the leading Klimt experts in the world.