Et is not long ago that a wedding was celebrated at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA), with which the museum has been promoting itself as a place for special occasions ever since. The bride’s family came from China, her husband was the child of Greek immigrants. The couple was allowed to set up their banquet table in a hallway with art from China displayed at one end and Greek art at the other. The bride and groom’s table was given the place of honor next to the undisputed highlight of the MIA. It is a nearly two meter high marble copy of a depiction of Doryphorus, believed to have been made between 27 BC and 68 AD. It is quite possible that the valuable marble will soon leave the museum. The Italian judiciary is convinced he was kidnapped from Italy and is demanding him back. A forty-year odyssey, which led Doryphorus via Switzerland and Munich to Minneapolis, should finally come to an end.
The Doryphoros (“spear-bearer”) of the MIA is considered the most beautiful and most valuable surviving Roman replica of the Greek original, a bronze by Polykleitos. In Germany it was widely reported when the statue was suddenly exhibited in the Glyptothek in Munich at the beginning of 1980 as “Doryphoros from Stabia”. A dealer living in Basel offered them to the museum for six million marks. The statue was said to have been recovered from the sea off the Italian coast and then stood in a private collection for decades. It was the story of a happy rescue. Only one Italian journalist had doubts about her.
Traces of soil on the marble
A television documentary by Achille D’Amelia, “L’Emigrante di Pietra” (“The Emigrant of Stone”), broadcast in the year of the exhibition, named Castellammare di Stabia, not far from Pompeii, as the locality. Robber graves discovered the statue in the mid-1970s, took it abroad unnoticed, and the antiques dealer Elie Borowski bought it. Four photographs presented by D’Amelia in his documentation show a marble statue dissected into four parts, said to correspond to the Doryphoros. Earth was still stuck in some places.
Italy then launched a scientific investigation, the result of which supports D’Amelia’s thesis: If marble is left in salty sea water for a long time, the surface will be attacked. But only traces of plant buds and roots were found on the Doryphoros. The Italian judiciary therefore demanded the confiscation of the statue, which was also ordered by the Munich public prosecutor’s office in February 1984. A year later, the Superior Court reversed the decision — and Borowski sold it to the MIA in December 1985 for $2.5 million.
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