A marble bust snapped up for just £28 in a charity shop has turned out to be a priceless 2,000-year-old ancient Roman work of art. Art collector Laura Young bought the chipped and grubby sculpture after spotting it at a Texas thrift shop in 2018.
But after a five-year investigation to discover its origins, she was astonished to find out that it was a millennia-old treasure which once belonged to a king. The statue - believed to be of a son of Julius Caesar’s enemy Pompey the Great - had belonged to Barvaria’s King Ludwig I in the 1830s.
He built a life-sized replica of a Pompeii villa - called the Pompejanum - in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria, to house the bust, which was itself created between 1 BC and 1 AD. It then surfaced in a German museum but disappeared from there following an Allied bombing raid in WWII.
