Focus on this artwork and analyze the Provenance.
In 2004 the Apollo Sauroktonos was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Apollo was thought to be the only known bronze version of the sculpture. It had been recovered from an East German estate after reunification of West and East German in 1990; Germany was separated after World War II. An elderly German man who was the legal heir successfully reclaimed his estate. While cleaning up the estate he found the sculpture in an old debris pile. Before World War II the estate belonged to his great-uncle and the heir remembered seeing it frequently when he visited as a young man. Because he believed it to be an 18th- or 19th-century copy of an ancient work, he sold it rather than investing in reconstruction. It was conserved later when it was identified as ancient. In 2002 a representative of the Cleveland Museum of Art saw it in the Geneva gallery of Phoenix Ancient Art, and the museum purchased it in 2004. The Apollo showed signs of severe damage that could have occurred during combat between the Nazis and the Russian Red Army in eastern Germany, Praxiteles’s masterwork was stranded at the time between the mayhem of World War II and the lengthy Cold War. The Apollo Sauroktonos was rescued by the art market.
Cleveland Museum of Art Praxiteles