Galleria d'Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi

Piacenza's Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery preserves the collection assembled by Giuseppe Ricci Oddi and donated to the city. Opened in 1931, its rooms trace Italian painting from the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, with works by the Macchiaioli, Fontanesi, Boldini, Boccioni and Morandi.

Why it matters

Ricci Oddi built a collection around artists he believed would endure and gave it to Piacenza. More than seven hundred works, mostly Italian and dating from 1830 to 1930, are arranged across nineteen rooms by region, movement and artist. The gallery is internationally known for Gustav Klimt's Portrait of a Lady, stolen in 1997 and recovered in 2019.

What to notice

The nineteenth-century galleries include works by the Tuscan Macchiaioli, Antonio Fontanesi, Giovanni Boldini, Giuseppe De Nittis, and the divisionist painter Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. The twentieth-century collection includes works by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Felice Casorati and others. Klimt's Portrait of a Lady, painted in 1916–17 over an earlier portrait, hangs among the international works. Its underlying composition was identified in 1996 after a local schoolgirl noticed its relationship to a lost image known from a magazine reproduction.

Context and history

Giuseppe Ricci Oddi, born in 1868, assembled the collection and donated it to the city. The purpose-built gallery opened in 1931. Ricci Oddi acquired Klimt's painting from Milanese dealer Luigi Scopinich in 1925. It was stolen on 22 February 1997 during preparations for an exhibition. On 10 December 2019, gardeners found the painting in a plastic bag inside a cavity in the gallery's outer wall. Experts confirmed its identity, and it returned to display.