What a find: Texas woman finds ancient Roman bust at Goodwill store

SAN ANTONIO — A Texas antique dealer’s search for something unusual was anything but a bust.

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In fact, it was a bust -- a Julio-Claudian-era Roman marble bust, weighing 52 pounds, at a Goodwill store in San Antonio. And it only cost Laura Young $34.99 when she bought it in 2018.

The bust, titled “Portrait of a Man,” went on display at the San Antonio Museum of Art on Wednesday, the San Antonio Express-News reported. It will remain at the museum and then will be returned to Germany on May 21, 2023, according to the newspaper.

“He looked Roman. He looked old,” Young, a Texas native who is a dealer in Austin, told the San Antonio Express-News. “In the sunlight, it looked like something that could be very, very special.”

The bust was “on the floor, under a table. It looked pretty dirty, pretty old”, Young told The Art Newspaper. She bought it and “asked some guy who worked there to carry it to my car,” where she secured it with a seatbelt.

It’s a good thing Young was careful.

An expert at Sotheby’s said the bust dates to the first century and was last known to be part of a museum collection in one of Germany’s cities in Bavaria, according to The Art Newspaper.

The bust was last seen at the Pompejanum in Germany, the newspaper reported. The facility housed many pieces of art that disappeared during World War II.

In January 1944, during World War II, Allied bombers hit Aschaffenburg and seriously damaged Pompejanum, according to the San Antonio Museum of Art. It was restored in 1960 and reopened as a museum in 1994.

But the bust disappeared after the war.

The bust is believed to depict Drusus Germanicus, an ancient Roman commander, according to The Art Newspaper.

It also could be a marble portrait of Sextus Pompey, Lynley McAlpine, a postdoctoral curatorial fellow and Roman art specialist at the San Antonio museum, told the Express-News.

Sextus’ father, Pompey the Great, fought a civil war against Julius Caesar. After losing to Caesar, Pompey fled to Egypt and was assassinated, McAlpine said.

Sextus fought Marc Antony and Augustus but was later executed, McAlpine told the Express-News. The only other known sculpture of Sextus is housed at the Louvre in Paris, the newspaper reported.

“It’s a portrait of an outlaw, a sort of enemy of the state,” McAlpine told the newspaper. “It’s unusual to have something like this. It’s also interesting that someone preserved it and had it in their collection as a personal enemy to the emperor. That could be dangerous to display something like that.”

Experts believe the bust was taken to the U.S. by a soldier, according to the San Antonio Museum of Art.

How did it get to a Goodwill store in San Antonio? Nobody knows for sure.

“Goodwill doesn’t do due diligence,” Young told The Art Newspaper. “They just have a door in the back where you leave stuff and then drive away.”

It took several years for Young to determine the bust’s authenticity. But after determining that is was a classic piece of art, she made an agreement with the German government to house the art in San Antonio for a year.

“He’d been hidden for 70 to 80 years, I thought he deserved to be seen and studied,” Young told the Express-News. “It was really, really exciting to see him in a museum. It was kind of surreal; he had been in our living room for over three years.”

Young said she would miss the sculpture.

“I liked him,” she told told the Express-News. “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.”

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