Woman Buys Ancient Roman Sculpture At Goodwill For $34.99
By Admin
Laura Young, a Texas antiques dealer, thought she had found a steal when she came across a stunning statue at a Goodwill store in 2018 for just under $35. And while she suspected she had come across something “very special,” little did she know the piece would turn out to be a priceless Roman bust dating back to 2,000 years.
When she first came across the bust, scouring for antique treasures in the Goodwill store, one of Young’s first thoughts was: “He looked Roman. He looked old.” And once she purchased the statue, she told the San Antonio Express-News, “in the sunlight, it looked like something that could be very, very special.”
Special, indeed. A Sotheby’s consultant eventually determined that the $35 sculpture was in fact a marble Julio-Claudian-era Roman bust.
It had taken years to determine the authenticity of the bust. However, after consulting a range of experts, Young was able to notify the German government of the finding and made arrangements to return it to the Bavarian Administration of State-owned Palaces, the newspaper reported. But first, she said she wanted it to be put on display in her home state and an agreement was eventually made to allow the sculpture to be put on exhibit at the San Antonio Museum of Art.
“He’d been hidden for 70 to 80 years, I thought he deserved to be seen and studied,” Young said.
How exactly the ancient sculpture dating from as far back as the late first century B.C. or early first century A.D. came to arrive in the Goodwill Store in Austin may never be known.
However, it once stood in the town of Aschaffenburg, Germany, in a full-scale model of a house from Pompeii, called the Pompejanum, built by Ludwig I of Bavaria, according to the San Antonio Museum of Art, where it went up on display on Wednesday.
Construction of the Pompejanum, which was completed from 1840 to 1848, was inspired by the excavations of Pompeii, the ancient city that was buried under ash following the deadly 79 A.D. eruption of Mount Vesuvius, according to the Bavarian Administration of State-Owned Palaces, Gardens, and Lakes.
During World War II, Allied bombers had targeted Aschaffenburg, damaging the Pompejanum and at some point, the bust vanished, the San Antonio Museum of Art said.
With the U.S. Army having established a number of military installations in Aschaffenburg, the museum said the most likely scenario was that a returning soldier had brought the sculpture to Texas. The rest of its journey is a mystery.
