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A Texas woman made an extraordinary find at a local Goodwill.
Laura Young, an antiques dealer, found what seemed to be a Roman bust at a thrift store in Austin, according to the San Antonio Express-News. Acting on her hunch in 2018, she purchased the 52-pound bust for $34.99 and took it home.
When Young discovered the bust, she notified the German government about its discovery and chose to display the bust at the San Antonio Museum of Art, which has a large antiquities section. The bust will return to Germany in 2023.
A Sotheby's consultant, Jörg Deterling determined the bust was a marble Julio-Claudian-era Roman bust that dates from the late 1st century BC to the early 1st century AD.
The earliest record of this piece appears in an 1833 inventory of King Ludwig I of Bavaria's art collection, according to the San Antonio Express-News. Ludwig I displayed the bust in the courtyard of his Pompeii full-scale model home — dubbed "Pompejanum" — in Aschaffenburg in Germany. Aschaffenburg was targeted during World War II in January 1944 and "Pompejanum" was seriously damaged.
While the house was restored in 1960 and reopened as a museum in 1994, the bust went missing after the war. It wasn't seen since — until Young found it at a Goodwill in Austin, Texas, in 2018.
Why and how did it end up there? "Researchers believe that because the U.S. Army established various military installations in Aschaffenburg, it’s likely that a soldier there brought the bust home to Texas," the San Antonio Express-News reported.
"It’s a great story whose plot includes the World War II-era, international diplomacy, art of the ancient Mediterranean, thrift shop sleuthing, historic Bavarian royalty, and the thoughtful stewardship of those who care for and preserve the arts, whether as individuals or institutions. We are so pleased that the Bavarian Administration of State-Owned Palaces agreed to allow us to have the sculpture on view at SAMA before it returns to its rightful home," Emily Ballew Neff, the Kelso Director, told the San Antonio Express-News.
Young visited the bust in the San Antonio Museum of Art for the first time over the weekend. "It was really, really exciting to see him in a museum,” she said. “It was kind of surreal; he had been in our living room for over three years," she said.