We sell Klimt's Judith to finance the stadium. Venice, alderman's shock proposal

It sounds like a belated April Fool’s joke, but in reality he is dead serious about the Venice City Council’s Councillor for Mobility, Infrastructure and Roads, Renato Boraso, who in an interview with the daily La Nuova Venezia launches what has been called a “shock proposal.” Sell Gustav Klimt’sJudith , one of only three paintings by the great Austrian painter preserved in Italy, to finance the construction of the new stadium. The project to be financed is called “Bosco dello Sport” and involves the building of a new stadium, a park in which it will be immersed and a sports hall, in the suburb of Tessera, on the mainland: an investment of 308 million euros will be needed. Part of this, 93.5 million, should come from European funding: in case this money does not arrive, here comes the idea of selling the Judith. In fact, the European Commission, which is supposed to provide the PNRR funds with which the works would be financed, does not agree that these are urban and social redevelopment works, as they are presented (this is the same diatribe underway for the renovation of the Artemio Franchi stadium in Florence).

“If a solution will really not be found, an extreme way out to recover resources is there: we can sell Klimt’s Judith II,” Boraso said. “In 2015, when the idea came to our mayor Luigi Brugnaro, the work was valued between 70 and 90 million euros; now it will surely be worth more. Just the amount that is needed.”

Klimt’s masterpiece has been in Venice since 1910, when the city purchased it after the artist exhibited it at that year’s Venice Biennale . There are only two other paintings by Klimt in Italy: The Three Ages of Woman at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome and Portrait of a Lady at the Galleria Ricci Oddi in Piacenza. This is not the first time that the current Venetian junta has proposed selling the work exhibited at the Ca’ Pesaro Gallery: the unhealthy idea had already flashed in 2015, when Mayor Luigi Brugnaro proposed putting the painting on the market to heal the municipal coffers’ budget .

The opposition naturally squared off. “Selling the Klimt? A very serious and inadmissible proposal,” comments Monica Sambo, councilwoman and municipal secretary of the PD. “It was 8 years ago and it is all the more so now that with the money collected we would like to build a stadium and an area, interventions that all over Italy are carried out with private resources or, as in the case of Bologna, with mixed public and private resources. The mere idea of selling a painting that is part of the artistic heritage of the city and in particular of Ca’ Pesaro makes one shudder. Europe has noticed that there is something wrong with this project and that there is also a conflict of interest.”

In fact, in Venice the project is highly contested because of the position of the mayor himself, who is also the owner of the local basketball team, Reyer Venezia, which could benefit from the possible new sports hall. Moreover, for part of civil society, the “Sports Forest” would be nothing more than a kind of concrete pour that does not have those regeneration needs that are presented: “The area of intervention (Venice-Tessera) does not present any of the characteristics of social degradation and vulnerability foreseen by the regulations, having very low indices of crime and a territorial structure mainly made up of single-family cottages within an unspoiled agrarian landscape,” Italia Nostra wrote. “On the contrary, vast areas of the city of Mestre, which would be fully entitled to obtain these PNRR funds, are left to their slow and inexorable decline.”

We sell Klimt's Judith to finance the stadium. Venice, alderman's shock proposal

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