COPENHAGEN: A bronze head of Septimius Severus statue, displayed in a Copenhagen museum, has turned into a dispute with Turkey, which claimed it was stolen in the 1960s during an archaeological dig, and demanding it back.
A statue of the Roman emperor, who reigned from AD 145 to 211, was recently returned to Turkiye without its head after spending decades in the United States as a part of a private collection that loaned it to New York’s Metropolitan Museum. It was thought the monument had been taken from a location in Turkiye.
The missing skull, displayed at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen for over 50 years, is allegedly in the Danish capital, according to Turkish authorities, AFP reported.
However, several Danish authorities claim they are not convinced. “We do not think the two things go together. We must compare the torso and head breaks because the paperwork is currently not very robust, the director of collections at the Glyptotek, Rune Frederiksen, said. According to an estimation made in 1979 by a former museum curator, the head, acquired in 1970 without any knowledge of its provenance, corresponded to a severed statue from a private American collection.
Statue pieces in exhibition
Even more, the two bronze pieces were put together for an exhibition. “The head was fitted to the torso in the sense that a pole was put into the neck of the head and fitted into the torso so that the two fragments approached each other,” said Frederiksen.
He felt that the gathering did not indicate beyond a reasonable doubt that they were intended to be together. “I don’t mean to imply that they shouldn’t be together. I’m just stating that we are not as certain as we may have been when we published the catalogs, possibly 25 to 30 years ago,” he remarked.
