Who’d have thought that a torn anterior cruciate ligament could lead to the return of a lost piece of ancient Roman art to its rightful home?
On Thanksgiving Day 2016, Austin antiques and vintage dealer Laura Young was hanging out at a friend’s house, her glaciologist husband in the midst of a six-month Antarctica stint. A 1-inch lip on the unfamiliar backyard deck tripped her up, resulting in a catastrophic knee dislocation and a torn ACL.
Nursing the injury, Young became hypervigilant when walking in spaces crowded with obstacles, such as the chaotic and overfull flea markets and thrift stores she frequented.
That’s why, during a 2019 trip to a Goodwill store in Austin, she said, “I’m looking down, I’m scanning the ground,” and there, hidden underneath a table amid other assorted objects was a carved bust that caught her eye.
What she found was an authentic first-century carved Roman bust that had once been in the collection of King Ludwig I of Bavaria.
The rare find drew attention from international media outlets including Art News, the New York Post, The Washington Post and the BBC.
Finally, after an arduous years-long process, including having the bust on display at the San Antonio Museum of Art for 12 months, Young’s discovery will be repatriated to its former home in Aschaffenberg, Germany, after May 28.
$34.99 = priceless
Over years of treasure hunting, Young had amassed extensive experience with art and antiques. The telltale warm glow of true marble and an expert plaster repair of the bust’s nose told her that she had stumbled across something special — at the very least, an expert 19th-century re-creation of an ancient statue.
She got help lugging the 50-pound object to the register and paid the $34.99 price noted on the yellow price tag stuck to the bust’s right cheek.
Young consulted with several national auction houses, eventually learning through a Sotheby’s expert that she had indeed discovered a piece of ancient Roman art that had once belonged to a Bavarian monarch, who built a replica Pompeiian villa to house his collection.
A photograph in the archives of the Bavarian Administration of State-Owned Palaces, Gardens and Lakes shows the probable bust in its grand former home, before Allied bombs in 1944 destroyed the Pompejanum, as Ludwig’s replica villa was known. Grainy black-and-white images in the SAMA display show before-and-after views of the Pompejanum, reduced to a pile of rubble by the bombing.
No one is sure how the statue made its way from Germany to an Austin Goodwill store, though it’s assumed that someone in the U.S. military might have brought it home as a souvenir.
National heritage
Once the bust’s earlier provenance — an art term for the history of ownership or stewardship of an object — was determined by the Sotheby’s expert, Young knew she could not keep or sell the artwork and that it must be returned, or repatriated, to its home country. (Repatriation refers to the patrimony of a nation, an all-encompassing term that includes national wealth from monetary reserves to artistic heritage.)
Young hired an attorney to guide her through negotiations for the artwork’s eventual return. Part of the agreement she reached was for the bust to go on display for one year at SAMA, which maintains a notable collection of ancient Roman, Greek and Egyptian artifacts.
As negotiations played out over several years, she was required to keep her discovery under wraps.
“Only very close friends and family knew he was here. I could not discuss him. I could not talk about him on social media. There were no posts, no nothing. It was essentially like this 4-year-old secret,” she said.
Knowing the bust would eventually change hands, Young named it “Dennis Reynolds” — after a favorite character on the television show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, whom she described as “this very difficult, cold, aloof, sociopathic, non-caring, non-emotional man who’s going to break my heart.”
The actual name of the person depicted by the bust is not known, though some presume it to be Sextus Pompey, a son of Pompey the Great, a onetime ally of Julius Caesar who resisted the famous emperor’s quest for total power and was killed in a civil war. Because the bust cannot be definitively identified, the museum title is simply Portrait of a man.
SAMA interim Curator in Chief Jessica Powers said King Ludwig’s interest in collecting and preserving ancient Roman art grew out of the general fascination among 19th and 20th century Europeans for the ancient world.
The current SAMA exhibition Roman Landscapes: Visions of Nature and Myth from Rome and Pompeii, on view through May 21, is the result of similar collecting impulses and offers a view of ancient Roman artifacts rarely on view in the U.S.
Connections to the past
“Material from museums in Rome just does not travel very often,” she said. A first-century carved marble wellhead is visiting the U.S. for the first time, Powers said, as are wall paintings in the exhibition’s final section, focused on tomb decoration, including one piece lent by the Louvre Museum in Paris.
So much history arrives to the present day as fragments, like the famous Venus de Milo statue lacking its head and arms, and the Roman bust separated from its original context.
Scholars such as Powers painstakingly piece together these scattered fragments into an increasingly coherent picture of the world of our forebears, offering cogent connections from the distant past to our very modern times.
Paintings in the Roman Landscapes show demonstrate concerns over how civic growth can affect surrounding natural environments, similar to concerns being debated in San Antonio today, Powers said.
Similar to the rapidly expanding Roman Empire of the first century, “our community is growing really fast,” she said, “and that brings a lot of benefits to our community,” but it also spurs debate over the effects on the Edwards Aquifer, Hill Country natural habitats and heritage trees in Brackenridge Park.
“So there’s a real modern connection for people to see the timelessness of these concerns about how do we as humans relate to our environment,” she said.
For her part, Young is happy to have played at least a minor role in rescuing a glimpse of the ancient past, though she admits she wasn’t mentally prepared for the story to go viral, which caused a momentary existential crisis.
Seeing herself on television morning shows, newspaper and magazine covers, and all over Google, she asked herself, “Why am I going to Goodwills if I can’t find a Roman bust again? Like, what is the point of anything?”
Then, giving her beloved Dennis Reynolds over to SAMA left a gap in her life. “it was a little sad there last summer, but it’s better now. … It was really insane there for a while, but it’s fine. I have an interesting story to tell,” Young said.
The Roman Landscapes exhibition is on view at SAMA through May 21, and Portrait of a man will remain on view in the museum’s antiquities section through May 28, both accessible with regular admission.
