Septimius Severus ruled ancient Rome as emperor for nearly two decades, and a seven-foot-tall statue that researchers say depicts him presided over the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the past 12 years.
But now the headless bronze statue, dating to 225 A.D. and valued at $25 million, is gone, one of the latest antiquities to be seized from the museum, whose collection has been repeatedly cited in recent months as containing looted artifacts.
The investigators who seized the statue said it had been stolen from Bubon, an archaeological site in southwest Turkey, in the 1960s. Another 17 items at the museum were characterized as looted artifacts in seizure actions filed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office over the past three months.
Those filings are part of a larger surge of warrants and seizure orders issued recently by the prosecutors to recover illicitly obtained antiquities from museums, galleries, auction houses and collectors across the United States, according to court records.
In addition to the Met, the authorities seized items from the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum and the Fordham University Museum of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Art, according to court records.
The statue of the emperor, which was on loan to the Met from a Swiss lender, is one of three items from the museum that are being returned to Turkey. Researchers said the statue was most likely one of a group of figures originally set up in a shrine in Bubon where members of the imperial family were worshiped during the period when Rome ruled the area.
“It was a shrine to the imperial cult,” said Elizabeth Marlowe, director of the museum studies program at Colgate University, who has tracked the statue’s history.
The bronze is important, in part, she said, because it is so rare. “This was a repository of extraordinary sculptures,” she said. “Most bronze statues were melted down in antiquity. But this site was somehow neglected. They were buried. They survived.”
History depicts Septimius Severus, who ruled from 193 to 211 A.D., as a wily African-born Roman general who outmaneuvered four rivals to assume the emperor’s seat and establish a new imperial dynasty. When it put the statue on display in the museum’s Roman Court in 2011, the Met identified the bronze as “Statue of a Male Nude Figure” without specifying the figure’s identity, and in a wall label said there was reason to question whether it was a depiction of the emperor. But researchers and the district attorney’s office have identified it as a statue of Septimius Severus.
A second antiquity that will be returned to Turkey from the Met is a bronze head of Caracalla, Severus’s eldest son, that is thought to have been made between 211 and 217 A.D. and is valued at $1.25 million. Caracalla succeeded Severus as emperor and had a reputation as a tyrant who used fear and bloodshed to rule. Researchers said they believe the bronze head was also looted from Bubon.
Recovering items stolen from Bubon and other sites has been a major goal of Turkish officials for decades. In the 1960s, investigators said, statues were dug up by local farmers and sold, rather than reported to the Turkish government as was required by a 1906 law and other statutes.
“The looting back then was done as a commercial enterprise for the villagers,” said Matthew Bogdanos, the chief of the district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit.
He said that farmers had used tractors to dig at the site, which had been largely buried under soil and debris from centuries of earthquakes and landscape changes.
The prosecutors were aided in their inquiry by investigators from U.S. Homeland Security Investigations and Turkish authorities.
The return of antiquities “sends a clear and strong message to all smugglers, dealers and collectors that illegal purchase, possession and sale of cultural artifacts will have consequences,” Reyhan Ozgur, Turkey’s consul general in New York, said at a ceremony last week when 12 items, valued at $33 million, were given back to Turkish officials.
Turkish and New York officials have said the investigation was greatly helped by some of the farmers who had been involved in the 1960s looting. They were able to identify which items they had stolen by looking at images from catalogs and museum websites shown to them by investigators, the officials said.
Investigators said many of the items from Turkey were smuggled into Switzerland and passed through the hands of Robert Hecht, an antiquities dealer who was based for a time in New York and who died in 2012. The investigators said their current inquiry into Hecht’s past dealings had helped lead them to information about the Turkish objects.
Already returned to Turkey last year by investigators was another statue said to have been stolen from Bubon. The largely intact eight-foot-tall bronze depicts the Roman emperor Lucius Verus and dates from the second century A.D. It is valued at $15 million and was taken last spring from the home of a well-known New York collector, donor and Met trustee, Shelby White, investigators said.
Among the items at the Met identified by investigators as looted are 15 artifacts associated with Subhash Kapoor, the former Manhattan art dealer who has been accused of smuggling more than 2,500 objects from India and South Asia into the United States over 30 years.
The Met issued a statement on Thursday that said it was ready to transfer the 15 sculptures to India after learning they had been illegally removed from that country.
“The Museum is actively reviewing the history of antiquities from suspect dealers,” the statement said. “The Museum values highly its long-standing relationships with the government of India, and is pleased to resolve this matter.”
Also being returned to Turkey from the Met is a stone sculpture described as a Perge Theater Head that dates to 290 A.D. and is valued at $250,000. Investigators said the marble head, which was on loan to the museum from a private collector, was stolen from Perge, another heavily looted archaeological site.
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