Country of Origin: Turkey
Museum: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
“In May 1967, villagers in southwestern Turkey uncovered an extraordinary trove of high-quality bronze statuary at Bubon, an unexcavated Roman site. Rather than notifying authorities, two local brothers organized a looting operation. At least nine life-sized statues and many additional statue fragments were sold to a dealer in Izmir and then smuggled out of the country, defying Turkish laws vesting ownership of antiquities with the state.
The Met’s other Bubon work is a prominently-displayed, headless, nude male figure that has been on loan to the museum since 2011 from an unnamed private collector. The label plays a deep game. It is unusually equivocal about the figure, identifying it as “Greek or Roman, Hellenistic or Imperial, circe 200 BC – ca. AD 200.” It states that the figure was formerly thought to match up with a bronze head in a museum in Copenhagen, and that the head is “believed to have come from a building devoted to the imperial cult at the small city of Bubon in Asia Minor.” However, the label continues, because the two do not, in fact, go together, the statue’s identity remains a mystery: “It may depict a god, a hero, a Hellenistic ruler, or a Roman emperor.”…
…this statue was one of the four acquired by Charles Lipson in 1967, the group most closely linked to Bubon; it thus almost certainly depicts a Roman emperor.” – Hyperallergic
Responses
The description accompanying the image of this statue in Marlowe’s article, quoted below, is as follows: “Bronze statue of a nude male figure, Greek or Roman, Hellenistic or Imperial, circa 200 BCE.-circa 200 CE, Anonymous loan, 2011 (L.2011.4).” The object cannot be searched via its accession number and is not currently listed on the Met’s website.
14 September 2022: “The Metropolitan Museum of Art displays two pieces associated with Bubon, but avoids connecting them to each other lest this raises questions about their respective paths to the museum.”
“The Met’s other Bubon work is a prominently-displayed, headless, nude male figure that has been on loan to the museum since 2011 from an unnamed private collector. The label plays a deep game. It is unusually equivocal about the figure, identifying it as “Greek or Roman, Hellenistic or Imperial, circe 200 BC – ca. AD 200.” It states that the figure was formerly thought to match up with a bronze head in a museum in Copenhagen, and that the head is “believed to have come from a building devoted to the imperial cult at the small city of Bubon in Asia Minor.” However, the label continues, because the two do not, in fact, go together, the statue’s identity remains a mystery: “It may depict a god, a hero, a Hellenistic ruler, or a Roman emperor.”
But as the Met surely knows, this statue was one of the four acquired by Charles Lipson in 1967, the group most closely linked to Bubon; it thus almost certainly depicts a Roman emperor. The Copenhagen head was only associated with Bubon because it was thought to belong to this statue, not the other way around. In this label, the museum not only pretends to know far less than they actually do, but deliberately misleads the public. This display at our nation’s most esteemed museum is, effectively, a laundering operation.” – Hyperallergic