An ancient marble statue of a Roman politician will soon return home to Italy from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. On Monday, the museum announced an agreement with the Italian government to return the artifact believed to have been looted during World War II.
The statue, dating from the 3rd or 4th century AD, depicts the head of the Roman Emperor Maximianus Heraclius. Discovered in 1931 during an archaeological excavation in Minturno, Italy, it was later published in the catalog of artifacts found during an excavation in 1938.
During World War II, a group of antiquities stored at the site of Minturno were stolen. A historian believes the pieces were likely taken by German forces or otherwise “dispersed” by unknown individuals as war raged across Europe, according to a statement from the museum.
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The statue, which depicts a Roman politician with a light beard and a fierce look, is rendered in a style taken from Egyptian stone carvings, a catalog entry for the piece in the State Department’s website notes.
The museum bought the statue – which had suffered losses to its original facial features, including the nose, mouth and lower left cheek – from a Swiss dealer in 1961 for $750. Loss of other records of his whereabouts prior to purchase. At the time of the acquisition, the head was said to have come from Rome.
Museum researchers conducted an internal review of the source of the work after an archaeologist told the State Department in July 2019 that the head had been lost from Italy during the war. Erin Bald Romano, a professor at the University of Arizona, became acquainted with work at the MFA Group while researching sculptures from Minturno and tracing its post-Nazi-era ways.
Several months later, the museum contacted the Italian Ministry of Culture to inform them of the statue’s whereabouts and agreed to return the work after the government agency confirmed the Foreign Ministry’s research in July 2020.
It’s not the only work brought back from the State Department’s collection in recent months. In February, the museum returned a pair of terracotta artifacts from a West African trading post. The artifacts are believed to have been illegally excavated sometime in the 1980s, and returned to the Mali government. A few weeks before that, the State Department returned Salomon van Ruysdel’s painting to the heirs of a Jewish collector.
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