The Venus of Cyrene, taken to Rome and returned

On 28 December 1913, Italian soldiers came across a marble statue at Cyrene, in the part of eastern Libya that Italy was then occupying. Court records describe the find as chance. The Encyclopaedia Romana at the University of Chicago says heavy rain had exposed it in the ruins of the Baths of Trajan. It shows Aphrodite rising from the sea. It is a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, made in the 2nd century AD, and it has lost its head and its arms.

Italy had annexed Cyrenaica and Tripolitania by royal decree in November 1911, after declaring war on the Ottoman Empire. The statue went to Italy in 1915. The Italian administration said this was to protect it from wartime destruction, and the later court cases did not contest that. It was shown at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome. In 2002 it came off view for restoration.

Libya first asked for it in 1989, according to Italian press reports. On 4 July 1998 the two states signed a joint communiqué in which Italy apologised for the suffering of colonial rule and promised to return archaeological pieces. The statue was named as an item to return in December 2000. On 1 August 2002 Italy’s culture minister signed a decree that moved it out of the class of state property that cannot be given away, because the State no longer had an interest in owning it.

Italia Nostra, an Italian heritage association, challenged the decree at the Lazio regional administrative court in November 2002. It argued that only a law could release the statue, that a Roman copy of a Greek original sits closer to Italian than to Libyan culture, and that a return would set a precedent. The ministry answered that the statue was found in Libyan soil during a military occupation and was only sheltered in Italy. The Libyan embassy joined the case. On 20 April 2007 the court dismissed the challenge. It held that the statue was not found on Italian soil, so the rule on inalienable property did not apply, and that Italy was bound by the 1998 and 2000 agreements and by customary international law.

Italia Nostra appealed. The Council of State, Italy’s highest administrative court, decided the appeal on 8 April 2008 and filed its judgment on 23 June 2008. It dismissed the appeal with different reasoning, based on customary law and two UN Charter principles: the ban on the use of force and the self-determination of peoples. Italia Nostra lost both cases.

On Saturday 30 August 2008 Italy’s prime minister flew to Benghazi and handed the statue to Libya’s leader. They signed a treaty of friendship that day, and Italy agreed to invest $5 billion over 25 years. The BBC and Reuters call the statue a goodwill gesture.

Where the statue is now is disputed. On 6 August 2015 a reporter for Il Giornale, writing from Libya, said there had been no news of it since 2008. Reuters reported in 2011 that about 9,800 objects were missing from a bank vault in Benghazi. The reporter did not say the Venus was in that vault, and later articles that call the statue lost go further than he did. On 25 May 2023 a French archaeologist of the French Archaeological Mission in Libya published a post titled “La Vénus de Cyrène n’est pas perdue”. He calls the theft rumour false. No other source reports anyone seeing the statue since 2011.