A court near Naples has asked a US museum to return of copy of a canonical Greek statue of ideal male proportions, the Doriphoros (lance bearer) of famed sculptor Polykleitos.

The court at Torre Annunziata says the Roman copy of the Greek original which the Minneapolis Institute of Art bought for a reported two and a half million dollars in 1984 was stolen from the ancient Roman city of Stabiae near Naples in the mid-Seventies by an international art trafficker, Elie Borowski.