NEW YORK, NY.- For many years, a Danish museum argued that its ancient head of Roman emperor Septimius Severus belonged to a bronze torso at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
This sort of discovery is rare in the world of Greco-Roman statuary, where headless torsos and torso-less heads are, though ubiquitous, seldom reconnected. But the museum, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, went so far as to arrange a loan so it could exhibit the head and body together in 1979 and even tried to buy the torso, without success.
Matters grew more complicated, though, in February when the Met was forced to return the headless statue to Turkey after investigators determined it had been looted. Turkish officials said they plan to claim the head in Copenhagen, Denmark, as well.
But a Danish museum official said in an interview that, contrary to its earlier belief, its 2,000-year-old head may not have been part of the statue just taken from the Met.
Rune Frederiksen, the Glyptotek’s head of collections, said the museum had begun doubting the connection in recent years, based on a “reassessment of what is widely known so far already.” He said numerous experts, internal and external, agree with the museum’s more questioning view.
The Turkish government is, perhaps not surprisingly, skeptical of the museum’s changed position. “It’s very clear water,” said Zeynep Boz, an official with Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, “but they are adding mud to it to cover themselves from the pressure they are coming under to return it.”
The Danish museum said it has launched further research into the matter, which is expected to take two years. Whether it will be able to hold onto its Roman emperor, or whether diplomats will get involved, is unclear.
But for now, Severus remains one of the multitudes of Greek and Roman rulers, gods and everyday citizens with heads divorced from their bodies.
“Although I have no idea of the precise statistics,” Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, wrote in an email, “today we have many more parts (bodiless heads & headless bodies) than complete statues. This is clear in any gallery of Greek & Roman art.”
Headless Bodies in Top-Shelf Museums
Many heads were lost because of the wear and tear of time. Necks are quick to break when statues fall. But other, less innocent explanations for the legions of severed heads include looting and regime change.
Smugglers cleaved heads from bodies to create not one, but two, sellable artifacts. Ancient insurrectionists and invaders decapitated statues to undermine the authority of rulers who had erected images of themselves as symbols of dominion.
“Every culture in the ancient world seems to do it,” said Rachel Kousser, professor of ancient art at the City University of New York. “The head is really powerful and damage to the head is seen as a particularly effective way of damaging power, whether it’s a ruler or a god or even just a private dead person.”
In one case, a bronze of Emperor Augustus from around 25 B.C. was decapitated by Kushite raiders in Egypt, who then defiantly buried the severed head beneath temple steps in the Kushite capital of Meroë, in modern Sudan. The feet of multitudes trod atop the head before it was discovered in the 20th century. It is now in the British Museum.
In some cases, the removal of heads was pure pragmatism. Roman statue makers often created archetypal body types and separate, highly individualized heads. As an emperor’s power or popularity waned, one head could be swapped for another. This urge to despoil images of the unpopular goes a long way toward explaining why so many statues of Nero lost their heads, said Eric R. Varner, professor of classics and art history at Emory University.
In other cases, the ancient statues just lost their noses. Early museum conservators replaced the noses with new ones, but the process was reversed in modern days as curators decided authenticity trumped appearances. (The Glyptotek in Copenhagen displays the removed, replacement noses in a collection it calls a “Nasothek.”)
Some experts said they do not spend much time searching for matches, given the odds against finding one. Some focus instead on the intricacies of a finely sculpted, if severed, head.
“You can almost fetishize its details,” said Elizabeth Marlowe, director of the museum studies program at Colgate University.
But as a matter of historical scholarship, linking a head to a body can help to determine whether a statue was intended to present the emperor as a hero or a god, as a warrior or a priest. The trappings of the torso, the drapery, the style of clothes — or no clothes — the pose and the weapons all bear clues.
So there is often rejoicing when a head and a torso find their way back to each other. “Statue of a Draped Woman,” a 2,000-year-old torso, had spent almost 50 years at the Getty before a curator came across its head, a carved marble portrait of a stern-looking Roman woman in a New York gallery.
“Sometimes things fit perfectly,” said Lapatin of the Getty. “Boom, it all lines up.”
A Match, or a Mistake?
Severus, a wily general who outmaneuvered four rivals to assume the emperor’s seat, ruled Rome from 193 A.D. until his death in 211 A.D. Seventeen centuries later, a bronze of his head ended up at the Glyptotek. The museum said it had acquired it in 1970 on the art market, but did not elaborate.
After the head came to the museum, one of its experts, Flemming Johansen, visited the Indianapolis Museum of Art where the torso, labeled as the body of Severus, was part of a show and on loan from collectors. Johansen experienced, the exhibition catalog described, “one of those rare and exciting events in the world of art history.” He had, he suspected, found his head’s body.
In 1975, a spectral analysis of samples from the head and the torso showed “nothing to contradict the hypothesis that the head and the body originally belonged to the same statue,” according to a later catalog published by the Danish museum. Four years later, the loaned torso and the head were displayed together in Denmark. The catalog reported that at one point “there is a match of the surfaces of fracture between the head’s neck and the body.”
Jale Inan, a Turkish archaeologist, saw the 1979 display in Denmark and concluded head and torso were a match. She later published a photo of the statue, head attached, from that exhibit as evidence. She acknowledged that the way the head had been affixed seemed off, but described it as an aberration that had to do with the fact that, among other things, the head had been oriented to face forward, rather than partly in profile as intended.
She determined, she wrote in a 1993 paper, that the intact statue had been part of a group of bronzes set up as a shrine to the imperial cult in Bubon, an archaeological site in southwest Turkey, when the region was a distant part of the Roman Empire.
She said local farmers had acknowledged to her that they found the bronzes in the 1960s and brought them to market, which violated Turkey’s cultural property law. Investigators from the Manhattan district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which seized the torso from the Met, said they also had interviewed local farmers in Turkey who confirmed the looting. The owner of the torso, who had lent it to the Met in 2011, did not fight the return.
In the 12 years it held it, the Met never subscribed to the theory that the torso was that of Severus. The museum called the figure simply a “Bronze statue of a nude male figure” and said in a wall label that it “may depict a god, a hero, a Hellenistic ruler, or a Roman emperor.”
In a statement, the Met went further, asserting it had contacted a bronze scholar years ago who said the Danish head did not seem to be a match, and that museum officials in Copenhagen also had their doubts.
The Danish museum and a Danish government website continue to post information online that links the Glyptotek’s head to the torso now in Turkey. Frederiksen, the head of collections, said that information will be updated when the museum’s review is completed, but, at this point, he said this evidence is no longer viewed as persuasive.
“This was strongly argued by previous colleagues of ours in the museum, but we do not — having recently begun a first review of the question — found any compelling evidence in this direction, which has also been the opinion by most scholars in the area since decades,” he wrote in an email. Pressed to detail what had changed the museum’s thinking, Frederiksen said, “The positive evidence (as far as known to us) for an association with this head to the said torso and at all to Bubon is circumstantial and weak.” He said it would be premature to discuss further until the review is complete.
Turkish officials and experts like Marlowe, who have studied the Bubon artifacts, remain convinced the head was part of the statue looted from that country.
“Bubon, the site, was plundered to its bones,” said Boz, the Turkish official.
To reunite the head and body, and reunite the whole group together again in Bubon is, she said, “beyond our dream.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
