“Another auction house managed to find the head in a catalog of items from a German museum in the 1920s and 1930s.” Per the article it was looted from a German museum.
How the german museum acquired it originally is anyones guess. But it’s possible it was legally acquired at some point over the past 1900 years.
It was legally acquired by the woman who just paid $35 at Goodwill. The thing is two thousand years old. Why do people care who owned it during the Weimar Republic?
Genuinely curious, what if something is sold three times? Imagine a collector's edition book - Say it's stolen, then a month later it's listed on FB Marketplace, then the buyer re-lists it on ebay, then that ebay buyer sells it to a pawn shop. Does the person who was robbed still have a right to the book? Or are there special laws for the consideration of historical artifacts?
> Does the person who was robbed still have a right to the book?
Yes, and everyone who bought it under false pretenses are entitled to a refund, but what actually happens in reality is messy and pretty much down to how far law enforcement is willing to go. Someone is always left holding the bag, ideally it would be the original thief but it's most likely going to be the last person in the chain who can be identified or isn't willing to go to the effort.
Yes, the law is that it belongs to the bona-fide owner. The third buyer needs to get their money back from the second, the second gets their money back from the first, the first goes to jail. The fact that this is often impossible is legally irrelevant, it belongs to the original owner.
One interesting place this came up was in the post-2008 financial crisis... turns out a lot of banks had been using an off-the-books legal record system, and transferred ownership of the property to the record system, and the record system would move it around internally to avoid filing fees every time a mortgage was resold. But this is actually specifically illegal in most jurisdictions, governments have a strong interest in a verifiable chain of custody maintained by themselves, they don't want it to go to an off-the-books system because then they might not be able to trace the true owner of a property. There is actually case-law dating back to the mid-1800s on specifically this - modern bankers aren't the first ones to try and create a "bearer note" conveying ownership of a mortgage lien, and it was specifically slapped down at that time, ruling that doing so would "separate" the note from the actual deed, invalidating the lien.
And it also turns out that many of the banks did it digitally, so they could not actually provide the original wet-ink mortgage, so they did not have an effective lien on the property at all in any respect, nor could they rebuild it themselves unless the owner voluntarily re-signed a note. So many of the properties in that era have (big airquotes) """title insurance""" that includes a clause that basically says "in the event of a defect in title, the title insurance doesn't pay out". So if the original owner figured out they might be off the hook, they could come back with improper foreclosure and get the property back, and you would be left paying a mortgage on nothing because the title insurance didn't pay out. My parents were looking to buy a foreclosed property in that timespan and the bank tried to pull one of those and they walked away.
(also, in that era many banks responded by simply forging the wet-ink mortgage notes. When they got caught, oops, no penalty and they got to try it again. Laws are for plebians.)
No, that's the opposite of how it works, and that's what I'm saying in my comment.
The original owner doesn't lose valid title just because it was stolen, and two people can't hold valid title at the same time (unless shared obviously, but you can't have two 100% owners). The second purchaser's title would not be valid, even if they initially thought it was at the time of purchase.
It doesn't matter that you didn't know it was stolen - it's still not yours, it belongs to the person it was stolen from. It's your job to get your money back from the last person, and their job to get their money back from the previous person - all the way back to the thief.
If it's not possible to recover the money from the thief - wow, sucks to be you. You have a claim against the thief, but that doesn't matter if they don't have any money. You can garnish their wages from their McJob when they get out of prison.
When art or other property is stolen often collecting from the thief is not possible, there are two innocents, the most recent purchaser and the original owner. The common law principle is that a buyer cannot pass on a greater title to previously stolen property, the original owner has the superior claim. But there are some exceptions. A good faith(bona fide purchaser for value without notice) buyer obtains a lawful title, even if there are others with a competing claim to the title provided several related requirements are met. Davis v. Carroll digs in to examples of what does and does not qualify as a good faith purchase in the context of valuable art.
Also notable here is that German law, and many other European countries is opposite the English common law rule, and effectively the burden goes the other way and the scope of good faith is widened. Article 932(2) of the German Civil Code covers this for instance.
When dealing with stolen property from 50+ years ago there are issues with the statute of limitations, and with laches as well
But in this case the museum doesn't have a better claim than you do either that they aren't the thief, just an older one. In fact theirs seems worse, just a record that they possessed it at one point in the 1920s. Could be that the curators who first logged it into inventory were the original thieves in the line plundering it from someone else vs paying fairly.
In the legal perspective, none of that matters. If the artifact can be definitively proven to have belonged to X, and they were robbed, then it belongs to X regardless of who's done anything in the meantime. That's the legal answer here. The same is true of real property, or a stereo. It belongs to the person it originally belonged to, before it was stolen.
Morally, it's debatable. Legally, it's straightforward, a stolen item does not become un-stolen with time, nor does the claim of the original owner diminish. Morally that's not how people think, but legally that's how it works.
The British Museum argument does not work for plebians. It's not "yours" just because you kept it for 100 years. Nor is it the next person's because they didn't know it was stolen.
The British Museum only works for the British because they were a god-ordained royal family that controlled an empire spanning the globe, then a nuclear-armed imperial power. It was based on the rather debatable legal theory of "try and stop us". It's increasingly recognized that it's unjust and seems increasingly likely that it will be dissolved sometime in the next hundred years. Because yeah, the same arguments apply to shit the British looted as shit the Nazis looted. It's not theirs. Maybe some countries will be willing to loan them back on a permanent basis though.
It seems to me if they want to have a legitimate claim strong enough to take it from someone who legitimately purchased it, then they will need to come up with some evidence that they themselves did not steal the statue from somewhere else in the first place.
Well by that logic it was stolen by the person who dug it up in Italy. After all, there’s someone walking around Italy today that is the heir to this sculpture. You have to draw the line somewhere.
At its zenith, the Roman Empire included these today's countries and territories: most of Europe (England, Wales, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Gibraltar, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine), coastal northern Africa (Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt), the Balkans (Albania, Greece, Hungary, Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Turkey), the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, Asia Minor, and some parts of Mesopotamia and the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Israel).
People get funny of the provenance of things that were taken by military force, go figure.
I'm trying to remember which state it is that periodically asks for their Confederate flag back from the Union state that acquired it on the battlefield.
Why is it "obviously" not? The subject was named Drusus Germanicus, after all.
The Roman Empire covered everything from Great Britain to the Persian Gulf. Artifacts produced anywhere in that (very large) region could be described as "Roman".
> Odd, why is this Roman sculpture being returned to Germany?
Because the museum was the rightful owner of the piece.
> It’s obviously not a German artifact and while I might be wrong, I assume it was “looted” from Italy.
To start with, Italy has been actively looted by Italians since at least the later part of the Middle Ages, but more actively from the Renaissance onwards. A lot of the pieces you see in other countries, and I'm quite certain this one fits the bill, were just traded privately between aristocrats for centuries.
And that's assuming it's from Italy at all, it could just as well have been found in German soil. Germany happens to host a few major Roman cities.
You generaly loot from occupied territories, not from peer nations.
If Britain invades and occupies Egypt, and starts digging up artifacts that end up on a British museum, that's looting.
If some Frenchman digs up some artifacts in France, and then sells/trades/gives them to a British museum, that's not looting. Because the sale/trade/gift is not done at gunpoint.
In this case, if the artifact was not plundered from an (occupation of)/(war with Italy) to begin with, the most recent rightful owner is someone in Germany, not the nation of Italy.
Sure, that may be the case - but my point is that if French law allowed what I described, it wouldn't be looting, because France is a peer of the UK, as opposed to a vassal.
Let's just assume that the way 19th century, Ludwig-II-style museums worked was not exactly historically accurate. This is the king who built Neuschwanstein Castle. He essentially cosplayed as a Roman sometimes, and he built a "Roman villa", more as a holiday home than a museum, and a roman villa needs roman stuff in it. It only became a museum later, half dedicated to the Romans, half to the old king.
It’s obviously not a German artifact and while I might be wrong, I assume it was “looted” from Italy.