A Danish museum is returning the bronze head of Septimius Severus to Turkey after agreeing that it was probably looted from a shrine honoring Roman leaders.
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.
