After 18 months of uncertainty, the Cleveland Museum of Art is sending a statue worth $20 million back to Turkey. The ancient Greek or Roman sculpture, previously thought to depict emperor Marcus Aurelius, was ordered seized in 2023 by a New York judge. The move was part of an investigation involving antiquities illegally removed from Turkey and trafficked through Manhattan.
The 76-inch statue came to Cleveland in 1986. Originally cast around 150 B.C.E. - 200 C.E., the subject was unconfirmed since the head is missing. After the 2023 order, the statue was removed and its name changed to simply “draped male figure” in CMA's online gallery.
The museum’s curator of Greek and Roman art, Seth Pevnick, said testing of soil and lead present in the bronze piece led to the decision.
“I have mixed feelings, probably not surprisingly,” he said. “There are very few statues of this scale and this quality of craftsmanship anywhere. So, we were very fortunate to have it here in Cleveland for the years that we did. But I also feel like we are doing the right thing here.”
The testing also involved comparing molds of the statue’s feet to the pedestal in Turkey where it once stood. Those tests led Pevnick and his team to conclude that the statue was not depicting Marcus Aurelius.
“Our statue, which is dressed like a Greek philosopher, seems to me to have stood on a statue base without the name of a Roman emperor or the name of anyone at all,” he said.
Pevnick said the research has opened the door for more possible cultural exchanges with Turkey in the future. They’re also discussing the possibility of displaying the piece in Cleveland, temporarily, before it’s repatriated.
“We're always, as curators, trying to understand as much as we can about the objects in the collection,” he said. “Part of that has to do with the way in which they arrived here. Every object is different. And there may be other objects where we have similar conversations like this, but we take each one on a case-by-case basis.”
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office outlined in a news release, how individuals from a village near Bubon began plundering a Sebasteion, an ancient shrine with monumental bronze statues, in the 1960s. The items were sold to smugglers based in the coastal Turkish city of Izmir, transported to Switzerland or the United Kingdom and then to the United States.
"New York-based dealers such as Jerome Eisenberg’s Royal-Athena Galleries and the Merrin Gallery funneled the stolen Bubon bronzes into museum exhibitions and academic publications thereby laundering the pieces with newly crafted provenance," the release said.
Since 2022, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit has seized 15 items from various sources, collectively valued at nearly $80 million.
