An antiques dealer may have found the bargain of the millennium after she found a priceless 2,000 year-old Roman bust - which was taken from Germany during the Second World War - for just $35 at a Texas thrift store.
Laura Young, of Austin, came across the 52-pound Roman bust at a local Goodwill store in her hometown in 2018 and didn't think twice before acting on her intuition to buy it. Busts from a similar time period have been sold for practically $30,000, online auctions suggest.
'He looked Roman. He looked old,' Young told the San Antonio Express-News. 'In the sunlight, it looked like something that could be very, very special.'
Young's instinct proved to be the right one. After acquiring the sculpture, Young contacted art experts at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as collectors and auction homes around the country to get a sense of its authenticity and origin.
An unknown specialist confirmed it was an ancient Roman artifact, but Sotheby's consultant Jorg Deterling was the one who resolved the era it was made in — dating back from the late 1st century BC to the early 1st century AD.
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Laura Young bought the 52-pound, 2,000-year-old Roman bust at a local Goodwill thrift store in Austin, Texas, in 2018 for $35, decades after it had been privately stored during World War II
The antique 'disappeared' after the Allies bombed the German town of Aschaffenburg during World War II, seriously damaging the Pompejanum - a replica of a Pompeii home - in the process
The sculpture is supposed to depict Sextus Pompey, the son of Pompey the Great, who was assassinated in Egypt after losing a civil war against his former ally, Julius Caesar
After years of consulting art experts, a Sotheby consultant told Young that her extraordinary find was sculpted sometime between the late first century BC to the early first century AD
'I got attached to him in our house, right there in the entryway. You could see his reflection on the television. He became part of the house,' Young said after giving up the bust to the San Antonio Museum of Art, where it will remain until it heads back to Germany in 2023
The bust, named 'Portrait of a Man' — was showcased on Wednesday at the San Antonio Museum, where it will remain until May 2023. The museum piece will then travel back to Germany, where it will reappear for the first time since the end of the Second World War.
'It had 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,' the San Antonio Museum of Art said on its website.
