“I was probably going to need an attorney.” “At that point, I realized I was probably going to need some help,” Young says. And giving it back to its rightful owners was a lot harder than it sounds. (If you have any information about who donated the head, please email me.) A constant presenceīack at home, Young had a problem: She was in possession of a looted piece of ancient art. Young asked the folks at Goodwill if they had any information about who donated it, but they said they don’t keep records like that. Workers slapped a price tag for $34.99 on it and put it out for sale. But somehow, someone decided they didn’t want it anymore and dropped it off at Goodwill. Perhaps the person who took it died or perhaps they gave it away. And then, we can guess, it sat in someone’s house for decades. in a soldier's duffel bag - maybe to Texas or maybe somewhere else. by American soldiers, according to The New York Times. Thousands of stolen pieces of art were brought back to the U.S. soldier who either looted it himself or purchased it from someone who had looted the object.” “So unfortunately in this case, it might have been a U.S. “We know that many of the objects were either destroyed in the Allied bombing campaign or looted afterward,” Mulder said. In the course of the battle, Pompejanum was hit by bombs and heavily damaged. In spring of 1945, Aschaffenburg was the site of a battle between the Nazis and the U.S. The German king, Ludwig the First, had something of an obsession with Pompeii, so he built this villa in the 1840s to house a bunch of Roman art.Ĭourtesy the Bavarian Administration of State-Owned Palaces,Gardens and Lakes via SAMA The bust on display in the Pompejanum in 1931, seen to the left, between two columns.Īlmost 100 years later, World War II was raging. The museum was a replica of a villa in Pompeii, which was buried in volcanic ash in the first century. The marble bust was cataloged at a museum called Pompejanum in the German city of Aschaffenburg. There are plenty of examples of German-owned art showing up in random places, years after they were last seen. We can’t know exactly how it wound up under a table at the Far West Goodwill, but we can guess. “So the object itself is not terribly unusual, but the presence of it here is what makes it extraordinary.” They’re generally not in Goodwills,” joked Stephennie Mulder, an art history professor at UT Austin. “There are plenty of Roman portrait sculptures in the world. How did a 2,000-year-old sculpture of a Roman general’s head wind up in a Goodwill in Austin, Texas?
It was listed as a portrait bust of a man named Drusus Germanicus.Īnd so began Young's four-year ordeal trying to get rid of a 2,000-year-old sculpture. Another auction house managed to find the head in a catalog of items from a German museum in the 1920s and 1930s. She contacted an auction house in London that confirmed it was really old - like FIRST CENTURY old. Young wanted to figure out what the sculpture was, so she did some Googling and she started to piece things together. So she bought the head and lugged it out to her car, buckled it into the passenger seat and took it home. “Clearly antique - clearly old,” said Young, who runs her own business as an antiques dealer and goes to a lot of thrift stores looking for treasures. Laura Young The sculpture Laura Young found in the Goodwill, buckled up to go to her house.