She paid $35 for a piece of art that was stolen by Nazis and felt that she had the right to “negotiate” the terms of its return? How about just give it back?
Give it back to whom exactly? How does she know who the "rightful" owner is without knowing its provenance? Possessing looted art is not a good look and neither is transmitting (wittingly or not) to a party that isn't the rightful owner. She did the smart thing.
That wiki page and the article clearly state this museum was built in the 1840s. So what is your basis for asserting this sculpture was stolen by nazis?
You don't know that. The German museum it was in was built in the 1840s, a hundred years before this sculpture was looted from it. It may well have been legally purchased a century or more before nazis existed.
I could not imagine that whatever this process must have looked like in the 1840s was completely bilateral for all parties. This was the era where you just sent an archaeologist and got some local day laborers to dig where you heard there might be good stuff, and took whatever you wanted back no questions asked.
> I could not imagine that whatever this process must have looked like in the 1840s was completely bilateral for all parties
Then let me help your imagination: A rich Bavarian king frequently goes on holiday in Italy, as was the fashion in Europe at the time. There, he regularly meets and intermingles with rich Italians who share his interests in antiquities. He purchases numerous artifacts from them, at a price both agree is fair.
It would be great if it happened like that, but all the museum has produced in terms of provenance is that it sat in their inventory at one point in the 1800s. No mention of the circumstances of how it came to be in the collection, unlike the legitimate purchaser who bought it and has a receipt.
Roman artefacts are dug up all over western Europe and even further. Is your premise that only one country is the allowed descendants of the Empire and that other constituted parts of the Empire aren't allowed their shared legacy?
If the statue is the Drusus Germanicus I think it is, he was a Roman general and politician who earned the agnomen Germanicus for leading successful military campaigns in Germania.
See also: Scipio Africanus; he got that name for conquering Carthage.
> It didn't look like the famous one, at least to me.
You're not alone in thinking that. The article says the sculpture might actually be Pompey, not Drusus Germanicus. Evidently there's no name written on it, so it was probably catalogued as Drusus Germanicus because somebody thought it looked like the Drusus Germanicus, but they may well have been wrong.
> Even if it were the famous one, he was, in fact, in Germany, yes?
He certainly was. As far as I'm concerned, Germany is a perfectly fitting place for a sculpture of Drusus Germanicus.
My main point here is you can't assume a Roman was from the place they were named after. They might have been, or might not have been. Generally speaking, it's not even a given that a person named Germanicus was ever in Germania nor had any ancestry from Germania. The son of Drusus Germanicus was the Germanicus, the most famous Germanicus. The Germanicus to whom you can refer with the name Germanicus alone. The Germanicus inherited that name from his father Drusus. Complicating the matter, the Germanicus then went on to lead numerous military campaigns in Germania as his father did before him, but he already had the name Germanicus as a child, inherited from his father Drusus. There are actually a whole slew of Romans with the name Germanicus and many of them likely never set foot in Germania. Emperor Claudius (brother of the Germanicus and son of Drusus Germanicus) had the name Germanicus as well, but he was probably never in Germania. Nero and Caligula were also named Germanicus. A ton of Romans were.
