Art News

Two Ancient Statues Stolen in the 1980s From Italian Museums are Now Home

ROME (AP),- Two ancient statues stolen in the 1980s from Italian museums are now back home, thanks in part to a police art squad expert who spotted one of them in a New York gallery while window-shopping on vacation in the United States. The bronze statue of the Greek god Zeus and a marble female torso, both dating from the 1st century, had ended up in the hands of a dealer and a collector in New York, officials told a news conference Friday in Rome. The torso, from a small museum in Terracina, south of Rome, was on display in a Madison Ave. art gallery when Michele Speranza, a member of the Italian Carabinieri art squad that hunts down stolen artifacts, strolled by when on holiday last year. “I stopped to look at the gallery window and I recognized the statue,” Speranza, 38, told reporters. “I thought I had seen it among the photos in our databank” of missing