CLEVELAND, OHIO—The Plain Dealer reports that The Cleveland Museum of Art will hand over a marble portrait head of Drusus Minor, the son of Emperor Tiberius, to Italy. Museum officials learned that the sculpture, acquired in 2012, was excavated and photographed at the town of Sessa Aurunca in the 1920s, and taken from a museum there in 1944, during World War II. They had thought it had been part of an Algerian collection since the late nineteenth century. “It is disappointing, even devastating, to lose a great object,” said museum director William Griswold. “On the other hand, the transfer of this object to Italy is so clearly the appropriate outcome that, disappointed though I may be, one can hardly question whether this is the right thing to do.” To read more about ancient Roman sculpture, go to "Artifact: Eagle Carrying a Snake."
