A priceless Roman bust has been missing from Germany since World War II, but it turns out it's just been sitting under a dusty table in an Austin, Texas Goodwill!
Some people really have the best luck thrifting!
Meanwhile, I look around thrift store for hours, with dust triggering my allergies, getting sad thinking about how all the original owners are all probably dead now... and how I'm just rummaging through dead people's stuff, judging their taste, and not even willing to pay the 2 bucks for an antique.
But I guess not everyone falls into that strange rabbit hole. Some leave the place with a treasure!
Laura Young is an antique dealer who found the Roman work of art with a yellow price tag on his cheek at a Goodwill in Austin in 2018.
She bought the 52 pound, all-white marble sculpture for only $34.99.
"Clearly antique — clearly old," said Young.
When she returned home with the handsome Roman head, she started doing some research.
Young reached out to an auction house in London where they were able to confirm that the portrait bust is of a popular Roman general named Drusus Germanicus, and was told the sculpture was more than 2,000 years old, according to KUT. Its last known whereabouts were at a museum built by German King Ludwig the First called the Pompejanum built in the 1840s in the German city of Aschaffenburg.
No one really knows how this priceless work of art ended up at a thrift store in Texas, but it is believed that the sculpture was most likely stolen by an Allied soldier in Germany after WWII.
How it ended up under a dusty table is a mystery.
"There are plenty of Roman portrait sculptures in the world. There's a lot of them around. They're generally not in Goodwills," joked Stephennie Mulder, an art history professor at UT Austin. "So the object itself is not terribly unusual, but the presence of it here is what makes it extraordinary."
"We know that many of the objects [in the museum] were either destroyed in the Allied bombing campaign or looted afterward," Mulder said. "So unfortunately in this case, it might have been a U.S. soldier who either looted it himself or purchased it from someone who had looted the object."
Young said she knew she couldn't keep the looted artifact, so she hired a lawyer to help negotiate how to get it back to Germany.
Not sure if Germany is the "rightful" owner, but okay...
Buying a rare, missing, and extremely valuable carved bust from 2,000 years ago for only 35 bucks is crazy, isn't it??
But naming it after a character from "It's Always Sunny is Philadelphia" may be even crazier.
Young named the Roman Dennis Reynolds because both the sculpture and the narcissist character from Always Sunny are "attractive," "cold," and "aloof."
Umm... okay.
Young said, "I couldn't really have him. He was difficult. So, yeah, my nickname for him was 'Dennis.'"
Yeah... I think it's about time this relationship ends.
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