“Pleased with the judgment of the court in Strasbourg, which recognizes our right to the Athlete of Fano,” wrote Gennaro Sangiuliano, the Italian Minister of Culture, on Thursday afternoon on X. The ‘Athlete of Fano’, also known as ‘Victorious Youth’ , has been the focus of a legal battle between the Italian government and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles for decades. The American museum purchased the statue in 1977, but the Italians claim it ended up in California illegally. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled on Thursday that Italian attempts to reclaim the statue are reasonable and therefore permitted.
‘Victorious Youth’ depicts a young man crowning himself with a laurel wreath. The bronze statue, one and a half meters long and weighing 64 kilos, is said to date from 300 to 100 BC and originates from Greece. According to some scholars, the Greek sculptor Lysippos or one of his followers is the artist behind the statue. The Getty Museum proudly calls it one of the few remaining life-size Greek bronze statues on its website. The statue probably sank together with the Roman ship that transported the ‘Athlete’ from Greece to Italy.
Not Italian
Italian fishermen removed the statue from the Adriatic Sea in 1964. “Victorious Youth” changed hands several times over the next few years, until the Getty Museum purchased the statue in 1977. The Italian government believes that the statue was smuggled out of the country and then sold illegally. The museum paid approximately four million dollars for the statue at the time, but allegedly failed to investigate the precise provenance of the statue. The Italians made a first attempt to recover the work of art as early as 1989.
In recent years, the Italian government has stepped up its efforts to bring ‘lost’ art from abroad back to Italy. The bronze Greek young man also came into view. In 2018, the Italian Court of Cassation issued a seizure order for the statue. The Getty Museum appealed that decision, resulting in the case ending up at the ECtHR. The lawsuit before the Court of Cassation was the result of an American appeal against an earlier judgment by an Italian court, which had already ruled in 2010 that Italy could reclaim the statue.
“Accidental Connection”
The Getty Museum argues that fishermen unearthed the statue in international waters, and therefore there was only a “fleeting and coincidental connection” between the land and the statue. “Getty’s nearly fifty-year public ownership of a work of art that was not created by an Italian artist, and not found within Italian territory, is justified, ethical, and follows U.S. and international law,” the museum responded to the verdict on Thursday.
The museum is located in the United States, which is not a member state of the Council of Europe. Therefore, the ECHR has no jurisdiction and the Court cannot force the Getty Museum to give the statue to the Italians. Both parties now have three months to appeal the verdict. The Getty Museum said it would “continue to defend its ownership of the image in all relevant courts.”
