The Cleveland Museum of Art will return a headless Greco-Roman bronze statue that was pillaged from the ancient city of Bubon in south-central Turkey. The larger-than-life statue of a draped male figure, thought to be a philosopher based on the pose, will remain on view in Cleveland for a yet-to-be-confirmed period of time before being transferred to Turkey. (The sculpture was previously believed to depict the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, and date from the final decades of the 2nd century.)<\/p>\n
In 2023, the Antiquities Tracking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney\u2019s office\u00a0took possession of the bronze statue<\/a>, although without removing it from the Cleveland Museum of Art, beginning a series of discussions\u2014and\u00a0a lawsuit over the $20m work<\/a>\u2014that eventually led to last week\u2019s announcement by the museum that the piece would be returned. \u201cThe New York District Attorney approached us with a claim and evidence that we felt was not utterly persuasive,\u201d says William M. Griswold, the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, adding that \u201cwe filed a legal challenge to the DA’s assertion that it had been stolen, subsequently requesting a number of scientific tests to establish once and for all the basis of Turkey\u2019s claim\u201d.<\/p>\n Turkish authorities permitted officials from the Cleveland Museum of Art to have access to the site, where it collected\u00a0samples of other bronzes, as well as soil samples, since a small amount of Turkish soil was found within the statue, to determine if there were a match.\u00a0Museum officials also made moulds of the feet of the sculpture, taking those moulds to the site in Bubon \u201cwhere we could try to set them up on top of the various stone bases, which have cuttings meant to hold bronze statues in place by means of lead plugs\u201d, says\u00a0Seth Pevnick, the museum\u2019s curator of Greek and Roman art. \u201cSo, we were able to compare the physical models of our statue’s feet to those cuttings to see where they best fit. And then we also did a similar comparison by means of 3D photogrammetry.\u201d Lead isotope analysis determined that there was\u00a0a match.<\/p>\n