2,000-year-old Roman bust sold at Texas Goodwill for $35 returned to Germany

• An ancient Roman marble bust found in Texas will soon return to its “rightful” home in Germany. 
• Laura Young bought the bust in 2018 for just $35 at a Goodwill in Austin, Texas.
• The artifact, which once belonged to a king, was likely stolen after World War II by a US soldier. 

An ancient marble bust will soon return to its original home in Germany after the 2,000-year-old Roman relic was bought for $35 at a Goodwill in Texas. 

Laura Young found the bust at a Goodwill in Austin, Texas, in 2018. She initially thought it was just a replica. Young previously told Insider. 

After getting in touch with auction houses about the sculpture, it turned out the centuries-old piece actually once belonged to a 19th-century Bavarian king. Art lawyers later estimated that the bust was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

How the bust ended up in Austin “remains a mystery,” according to the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA). However, it likely made its way to the US after World War II, stolen by a returning soldier. 

While the sculpture is currently on display at the San Antonio museum, it will soon return to its “rightful home” when repatriated to Germany next month. 

“It’s been really bittersweet,” Young told CNN on Thursday. “I’m a little in denial, but I do plan on visiting him in Germany.”

The sculpture will remain displayed in Texas until May 21 and then be shipped back to Europe. 

“Upon its return, the portrait will either go back on display in its original location at the Pompejanum in Aschaffenburg or at the Munich Glyptothek with the rest of Ludwig I’s collection,” a spokesperson for the Glyptothek museum recently told Artnet News.

Ludwig I, the King of Bavaria from 1825 to 1848, acquired the sculpture sometime before 1833. He displayed the piece in the Pompejanum — his replica of a Roman villa in Pompeii — in the town of Aschaffenburg, Young’s lawyer told The New York Times.

Young said she knew she couldn’t keep the sculpture once its origins were revealed.

“Either way, I’m glad I got to be a small part of (its) long and complicated history,” she said in the SAMA press release. “And he looked great in the house while I had him.”