An ancient bronze thought to be a likeness of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus is to be reunited with its long lost torso after a Danish museum agreed that its sculpture of a bearded man’s head had been looted and should be returned to Turkey.
The torso, which for years stood in the Roman Court of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was returned to Turkey in 2023 after its seizure by investigators who said it had been looted.
Since then, the Turkish government has been petitioning the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, requesting the return of the 2,000-year-old head to complete the statue. Last week, the Danish museum said its researchers had concluded that the artifact, which has been in its collection since 1970, was likely to have been excavated illegally from Bubon, a site in the southwest of Turkey that investigators say was heavily looted in the 1960s.
The Danish museum said it had made its decision after prolonged research. “Exceptionally strong arguments and scientific documentation are required to separate a work from the museum’s collection,” Gertrud Hvidberg-Hansen, the museum’s director, said in a statement. “In the case of this object, both criteria were present.”
Severus was a wily general who outmaneuvered four rivals to assume the emperor’s seat, and he ruled Rome from 193 A.D. until his death in 211 A.D.
His intact statue had been part of a group of bronzes that experts believe was set up two thousand years ago as a shrine to the imperial cult in Bubon, when the region was a distant part of the Roman Empire. As part of the cult, the emperors were worshiped as gods.
At some point in history, the site was buried underground but was targeted by looters in the 1960s, and artifacts were removed and sold, in violation of Turkey’s cultural property law, investigators say.
It’s not clear whether the torso lost its head at the time of the illegal excavation, or whether the separation had occurred centuries, or millenniums earlier, in the tumult of history.
The Danish museum said in its statement that “archival and archaeological studies and technical analyses” of Severus’s head had led to its conclusion that it had been looted. The head, it said, “probably belongs to a larger group of bronze sculptures of the Roman imperial family believed to have originated from the so-called Sebasteion — a shrine to the Roman imperial cult — in Boubon.”
Turkey welcomed the return of the emperor’s head, and Hakan Tekin, the Turkish ambassador to Denmark, said the museum “has done the right thing.”
“This development sets another precedent for institutions and collectors all over the world, including in Denmark, that all artifacts acquired with a shady provenance should be returned to their rightful owners,” he said in a statement.
For many years, the Glyptotek had said its ancient head belonged to the torso in the Met and had exhibited them together in Copenhagen in 1979.
But in recent years, museum officials expressed skepticism that the two were an exact match, saying in an interview in 2023 that the evidence linking them was “circumstantial and weak.”
The Met did not embrace the theory that the torso was a depiction of Severus. In the 12 years it held it, the museum called the figure simply a “Bronze statue of a nude male figure.”
The Glyptotek said that while its new research had determined that the head probably originated in Bubon, their experts were not as confident in asserting that it belonged to the body seized from the Met.
“The Glyptotek’s researchers have not been able to examine the possible connection between the bronze portrait and the bronze body,” it said. “It is therefore not possible to comment on the relationship between these two artifacts.”
The Danish museum said it had purchased the head in 1970 for 365,500 Swiss francs, or about $85,000, from Robert Hecht, an American dealer who would become famous — and later infamous — as one of the world’s great dealers of antiquities, both looted and legitimate.
In addition to the torso at the Met, investigators from the Manhattan district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit in recent years have seized and returned several other items that experts believe were taken from Bubon, including statues of the emperors Lucius Verus and Caracalla.
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