Category: Antiquities

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Marlowe, Associate Professor of Art; Chair, Department of Art & Art History; Director, Museum Studies Program.

Some Key Facts on the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Portrait of Septimius Severus and the Corpus of Bubon Bronzes

The over-life-sized bronze head of Septimius Severus at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen has been much in the news lately. Turkish officials are calling for its return because for the last 50 years (up to and including the museum’s own website), the museum has asserted that the head originally belonged to an over-lifesized bronze body [2] that, until recently, had been on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The body was seized by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in March, and has now been returned to Türkiye. 

I have been researching these artworks for several years and am in the process of preparing a large publication (on an open-access, updateable, bilingual website) of all that I have learned. I offer here a brief summary of the main evidence concerning the Glyptotek head with the goal of ensuring that all parties involved in the discussions, including journalists, have the relevant facts at their disposal (something that has not been the case in all of the recent reporting). My main concern is that the discussions seem to be focusing on the wrong issue. The question of whether the museum’s bronze head can be proven to go with that particular body is a secondary matter. The key issue is whether it comes from a particular Roman site in Türkiye whose looting in the 1960s is a matter of well-established fact. I’m grateful to Derek Fincham for sharing his Illicit Cultural Property platform with me for the purpose of presenting the evidence on this question. 

In May, 1967, Turkish authorities, acting on a tip about a large-scale act of archaeological looting, arrived at the village of Ibecik, where they discovered a large, ancient bronze statue hidden in a local house. Eventually, the police persuaded the homeowner, together with a number of other villagers, to reveal where the statue came from. In the following days, archaeologists from the nearby museum at Burdur conducted an emergency excavation at the site, known in antiquity as Bubon, and found a large three-sided platform and several free-standing statue bases [3].

These were inscribed with the names of fourteen Roman emperors and empresses, suggesting that this room had once been filled with statues, and that it may have been a shrine for the worship of the emperor and his family, a practice we call the “imperial cult.” But the statues had all disappeared, with the exception of the one the authorities had recovered (this statue is today in the Burdur museum) [4].

The Turkish archaeologist Jale Inan investigated, and was told by  the villagers that they’d been selling the statues as they found them to a dealer, netting as much as 90,000 Turkish lira for the largest and best-preserved figures. Their accounts are vague and contradictory, but they admitted to selling at least nine or ten statues as well as many additional fragments, including heads, arms and legs. Most were nude male figures, they reported, but one was clothed, and at least one was female. One of the male nudes, the largest of the group, was nearly 9 feet tall, and was the only figure in the group that was completely intact. 

Meanwhile, starting in the mid-1960s, a number of bronze figures, portrait heads, and body parts began showing up on the art market. We now know that at least two of these were trafficked by the same person: both a bronze female head at the Worcester Art Museum (whose bust may not belong to the original work) and the head at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek were first sold by the notorious Robert Hecht. (The latter piece of information had been a tightly-kept secret in Copenhagen, and only became public knowledge earlier this month thanks to reporting by Camilla Strockmann.) It is very possible that Hecht – who had been barred from Türkiye in 1962 for trafficking in looted antiquities – was behind the entire group.

There are today approximately ten bronze heads and a dozen bronze bodies currently residing in public and private collections around the world (mostly in the U.S.) that almost certainly came from Bubon. I say “almost certainly” because of course the networks that move illegally plundered antiquities from the ground, smuggle them across borders, and deliver them to the high-end galleries of Europe and the U.S. are designed to cover their tracks. These are laundering operations – the original stain is supposed to be invisible by the end. But fortunately in the case of Bubon, enough facts are known about the looting and the pieces themselves that we can identify some clear criteria for determining whether a particular bronze was almost certainly looted from the site: 

• Does it depict a Roman emperor or family member, or could it have been part of a statue that did? (There may have been non-imperial statuary that was also looted from the site, but for now I’m focusing on pieces that can be associated with the imperial shrine.)
• Did it surface on the market at some point between 1964 and the early 1970s?
• Does it feature small square bronze patches on its surface? These patches, typically a couple of centimeters long, are the hallmarks of the local bronze workshop that produced these works. The ancient metalsmiths laid the patches in  sawtooth patterns along the seams when they soldered together the individually-cast components of these large bronze statues, and they also used them singly to strengthen weak spots in the bronze surface [5].

As far as the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek’s portrait of the emperor Septimius Severus is concerned, there is no doubt that it meets these criteria. The museum purchased it from Hecht in 1970. The line of square patches around the neck where the head was originally attached to the body in antiquity is very visible [6].

We can also add to the evidence the fact that one of the statue bases at Bubon is inscribed with the name Septimius Severus, so we know there was a portrait of that particular emperor at the site. These are the key facts that should be determining whether the museum is going to return the head to Türkiye. Whether or not we have correctly identified which of the headless Bubon bodies the head went with is a separate question. We know it almost certainly went with one of the bodies from the site. 

There is also the fundamental fact that the head has to have come from somewhere – from some over-life-sized bronze statue of Septimius Severus that was produced in the ancient workshop that used the unusual patchwork technique. What is the likelihood that there was another such discovery by looters, right during the very same period that the looters at Bubon turned up their bonanza of imperial bronzes? It’s worth remembering how extremely rare statues like these are in the modern world; for every bronze portrait or statue that has survived from the ancient Mediterranean, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of surviving marble works. That is because bronze is precious and can be melted down. Over the centuries the vast majority of ancient bronzes were recycled and turned into things like coins, weapons, nails and the like. 

And even if this is all just an extraordinary coincidence, and the Ny Carlsberg head comes from some other looted site, the patchwork itself still strongly ties the piece to Türkiye. This means that unless the head came to the museum with an export license from the Turkish government, it has to have been smuggled out of the country in violation of Turkish cultural heritage laws. Public and private collectors in Europe and North America sometimes suggest that countries of origin didn’t care about their ancient artifacts and did little to protect their cultural property during this period, and that by collecting ancient art, they are “saving” it. But in fact, Türkiye’s deep concern around these issues is evident in its efforts to keep Hecht out of the country, by the police intervention at Bubon in 1967, and by Jale Inan’s tireless efforts over the course of her career to draw attention to the tragic history of this site, whose market-fuelled plundering destroyed what would have been one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of the century. 

In sum, we know the Septimius Severus head was looted from Türkiye and trafficked by one of the art market’s shadiest characters. Why is the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek defending its right to own stolen property? What are the museum’s ethical principles?

* * *

Even though it is a secondary matter as far as the choice facing the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek is concerned, while we’re here, here is the evidence that connects the Copenhagen head with the body that was recently seized at the Metropolitan Museum and returned to Türkiye:

• According, again, to Jale Inan, the feet of the Met statue fit the indentations on the statue base with Septimius Severus’ name. So the head that was attached to this body has to have been a bronze portrait of Septimius Severus. No other viable candidate has turned up in the 56 years since the body surfaced on the international market.

• In recent statements to the press, the director of collections at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Rune Frederiksen, has suggested that the association between the head and the body was just an idea that his predecessor, Fleming Johansen, had come up with out of nowhere at some point in the mid-1970s after the museum had acquired the portrait. In fact, the link between the two pieces had long been known among experts. The Met body was referred to as Septimius Severus as early as 1967, the same year it was acquired (along with several other Bubon pieces) by the Boston dealer Charles Lipson. Cornelius Vermeule, the curator of Greek and Roman art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, discussed Lipson’s statue as a portrait of Septimius Severus in a presentation that year at the annual meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America. He mentions it again as Septimius Severus in an addendum to his 1968 book, Roman Imperial Art in Greece and Asia Minor (Belknap Press, p. 546). There is, of course, no valid reason to identify this headless body as Septimius Severus without the connection to a portrait head of that ruler. It is highly unlikely that Vermeule would have done so in front of his colleagues at the archaeologists’ conference if he didn’t know that the evidence behind it was solid. 

• Of the eleven heads that have been associated with Bubon, only the Copenhagen head is broken off from its body well below the ancient seam that joined the head and body at mid-neck. If the head indeed comes from this site (see evidence above), it must go with one of the few Bubon bodies that is missing the entirety of its neck. There are only two candidates that meet this criterion. One is the statue recently seized at the Met. The photo that was produced when the head and the body were briefly brought together in Copenhagen in 1979 certainly looks awkward [7].

• But the awkwardness may be due to the incorrect positioning of the head (Inan hypothesized that it may have been turned to the right, toward the raised arm; at any rate it certainly would have been lower) and to the deformations of the metal caused by the violent process that ripped the head from the body so far below the ancient seam. The other potential candidate for a match with the Copenhagen head is a bronze body in an identical pose as the Met statue, and likewise bearing the tell-tale bronze patches, that was recently resold by Royal-Athena Gallery (it is listed in the 2006 catalog, along with a female body, as originating at Bubon). I have seen this privately-owned body in person. My impression is that it is too small for the Copenhagen head. Of course, a sustained scientific examination is needed to know for sure. 

Frederiksen is right to emphasize that more research must be done to determine which statue the head belongs with; as he told the Turkish paper the Daily Sabah, “we have to compare the breaks of the torso and the head.” It is noteworthy, however, that Frederiksen has not tried to deny that the Septimius Severus head came from Bubon. That, and not its association with the Met head, is what should determine where it belongs today. Indeed, the only way we will ever be able to compare the breaks as Frederiksen advocates is to reunite the pieces. 

Key Bibliography:

İnan, J. 1979. “Der Bronzetorso im Burdur-Museum aus Bubon und der Bronzekopf im J.-Paul-Getty-Museum,” Istanbuler Mitteilungen 27/28 (1977/78) [1979], pp. 266-287.

İnan, J. 1994. “Neue Forschungen zum Sebasteion von Bubon und seinen Statuen,” in Akten des II. Internationalen Lykien-Symposions Vienna, 6.-12. Mai 1990, ed. J. Borcchardt, J. and G. Dobesch, Vienna 1993, pp. 213-239.

İnan, J. 1994 . Boubon Sebasteionu ve Heykelleri Üzerine Son Arastirmalar, Istanbul.

Kozloff, A. P. 1987. “The Cleveland Bronze: The Emperor as Philosopher,” Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 74, 82-113.

Lubos, M., 2016, “Bubon Bronzes – New Perspectives,” Proceedings of the XVIIth International Congress on Ancient Bronzes, Izmir.  Monographies Instrumentum 51, 2016, 265-73 (to be used with caution).

Vermeule, C. 1980. “The Late Antonine and Severan Bronze Portraits from Southwest Asia Minor,” in Eikones. Studien zum griechischen und römischen Bildnis. Hans Jucker zum sechzigsten Geburtstag gewidmet (Bern, 1980), 185-90.