The Discobolus Lancellotti, sold to Hitler in 1938

In July 1938, in the Glyptothek in Munich, Adolf Hitler, the German chancellor, showed a marble discus thrower to the public. Sources give 9 or 10 July. The BBC reports that he told Germans to go and see how fine the human body had once been. The statue had left Rome only weeks before.

It is a Roman copy, made in the 2nd century AD, of a lost bronze by the Greek sculptor Myron. It was found on 14 March 1781 at the Villa Palombara on the Esquiline hill in Rome. It later stood in two Roman palaces and passed to the Lancellotti, a noble family. Italian law of 1909 protected it, and a ministry decree of that year banned its export without a permit. The family had tried to sell it before, including to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and to the Berlin State Museums.

In 1937 Giuseppe Bottai, Italy’s minister of national education, refused an export request. A committee told him that this was the best of the known Myron copies. A German commission under Prince Philipp of Hesse then came to Italy to buy art, and the statue was its first request. Hitler saw it in the Lancellotti palace during his state visit in May 1938. On 7 May the German embassy told Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano that he wished to buy it.

Bottai kept opposing the sale. He asked Mussolini, the Italian dictator, to have the state buy it, and wrote that he would obey if higher reasons required it. Mussolini did not stop the sale. The museum says he acted as go-between. Archeologia Viva reports that Ciano ordered Bottai on 18 May to send the statue at once. Bottai released the export on 3 June 1938. Brasca, writing from the state archive file, notes that the family had already signed a sale to Berlin that broke the ban.

The price is disputed. The Museo Nazionale Romano gives 16 million lire in cash, and Archeologia Viva says reports of the time gave the same. Brasca, the BBC and Finestre sull’Arte give 5 million. The Munich collecting point card says 6,485,000. The sources range from 5 million to 16 million lire. None gives a dollar figure, and none says whether fees are included.

After the war the statue was held at the Munich Central Collecting Point, from 28 August 1946. It left for Rome on 16 November 1948. Return was hard because the statue had been bought, not seized. Rodolfo Siviero, an Italian intelligence officer who led the recovery of Italian art, led the effort. Italy claimed it as illegally exported. It went on show in Rome in 1953.

In December 2023 Stephane Verger, director of the Museo Nazionale Romano, asked Munich for the 17th-century base, which stayed in the Glyptothek. Corriere della Sera reported that Florian Knauss, the Glyptothek director, said he could not give up Germany’s legal claim to the statue. Knauss told Finestre sull’Arte on 5 December that the Glyptothek had not requested its return. The same day Italy’s culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, said that Berlin makes no claim. The statue is in Palazzo Massimo. The base was still in Munich in December 2023.