The Curious Case Of The Getty's "Victorious Youth"

Many of the folks who know me know that I am a huge art lover and supporter of local museums and galleries, and the world of art is endlessly fascinating to me. Beyond the art itself, the details of how a painting or sculpture came to be owned or exhibited by a particular person, museum or even country is often times as interesting as the story behind a work of art's creation. Such is the case with one of the centerpieces of the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, the bronze sculture known as Victorious Youth. Believed to have been hewn in Greece between 300 and 100 BCE, possibly by Lysippus (the personal sculptor to Alexander the Great), the sculpture was found in the summer of 1964 in the sea off Fano on the Adriatic Coast of Italy, snagged in the nets of an Italian fishing trawler. 

The bronze statue apparently was being transported by ship and lost at sea. Brought to land after 2,000 years, it is so beautiful, well preserved, and rare (and delicate) that it commands a climate-controlled room of its own at the Getty. But since the statue surfaced 5 decades ago, it has been the subject of numerous legal and moral quandaries, and the Getty, which purchased the statue in 1977, is seeing its ownership hanging in a legal balance this week in Italy's highest court. At issue is the fishermen's right to have owned and sold the treasured art and whether the Italian courts can prove it was actually looted. Italians who want the statue back believe that clear subterfuge took place in the mid-1960s after Victorious Youth reached land, which makes it ethically damaged goods that should be returned. They assert that the bronze was smuggled out of Italy (after being buried in a cabbage patch and later hidden by a priest in a bathtub) without the proper export papers, and that the Getty was willfully negligent in carrying out due diligence before buying the work.

It is unclear what the Getty Board will do if the court finds the statue is the rightful property of Italy. Italian courts and Italian and German investigators have been over this terrain before — first in the late 1960s and 1970, when Italy's highest court found no reason to declare the statue Italy's property, and again in a 1973 police investigation when the bronze had landed in Germany and J. Paul Getty was mulling whether to buy it. In 2007, a regional court in Marche, Italy concluded a prosecutor's request to have the statue declared Italian property was not valid because the legal deadline for recovering allegedly stolen property had passed. Local prosecutors kept trying, however, and in 2010 the regional court reversed its previous decision and ordered the Getty to return Victorious Youth to Italy. The Getty appealed and, after subsequent twists and turns, it's now up to the high court in Rome.

It appears the intrigue surrounding this priceless find may soon be over...or not, considering its history since being discovered. If you are interested in more details about the crazy journey of Victorious Youth, please visit this link and this link. And for those who share my passion for art, the Google Art Project is an amazing online platform through which the public can access high-resolution images and virtual tours of artwork housed in many of the world's greatest museums including LACMA, The Getty, MOMA, the National Gallery in London, the Smithsonian, and the Palace of Versailles. Take a step into this amazing world here.