We're standing in the Greek and Roman Courtyard
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at
a gorgeous bronze sculpture of a male nude
but this is a sculpture that we do not know a lot about.
It's thought to have been one of a large group
of bronze sculptures that were found in the late
1960s by local villagers in a town in
a town in southwestern Turkey
at a site that has been identified as a sebasteion
which is a nice word that means a building dedicated to the imperial cults
so this is like a temple where the Roman emperors were worshipped.
Western Turkey had at one point been Greek
and then it had become part of the Roman Empire
and so you have generations of types of temples.
And one of the ways that cities sought to earn the favor of the imperial government back in Rome
was by setting up these centers of worship of the imperial cult.
It was a way of showing how much "we love you Roman Emperors now please give us tax breaks"
or whatever other benefits they wanted.
and the figure itself clearly shows the Greco-Roman context out of which it came.
The figure is represented in a beautiful contrapposto
The weight is on the right leg, the left leg is free.
The body responds to that.
There's a sense of ease that we associate with the classical.
The muscles are all beautifully portioned, they're well-defined but not bulky
This embodies that Classical ideal, a hundred percent
But the villagers who unearthed this sculpture
knew that they were doing something illegal.
There were laws in place, in Turkey, to preserve cultural heritage.
And yet, here it is now, in a museum in New York.
What happened is that, starting in the 70s and especially during the 1980s
These life-size bronze statues that seem for stylistic reasons
All to have been created in the mid-second century
started showing up on the art market.
Really, at once. Even though this is a genre that is very rarely preserved.
Bronze is rare because it can be re-melted
It can be used for weapons, it can be used for other sculptures
and the result is most sculptures that we have form the ancient world are marbles
So there's this sudden availability of a large
number of these spectacular life-size bronze sculptures
on the market
that museums and private collectors begin eagerly snapping up
pay top dollar for them because of the quality
because of the rareness.
Now we don't know who snapped this particular sculpture up
and the Met's label says "Anonymous loan."
It's probably owned by a private collector
and usually museum's do this because the hope is that eventually
that private collector will leave it to the museum.
The sculpture that's before us is headless
but what seems likely is that
the sculpture, when it was unearthed, was intact
and the head was severed because that could be sold separately.
Now the fact that the sculpture was probably unearthed
in the 1960s is EXTREMELY important
In 1970, UNESCO passed a convention stating that
all signatories would from this point forward respect
each others cultural property laws
So everyone who agreed to participate in this convention
Were agreeing to no longer import
the cultural property from countries that wanted
to retain that material for themselves
So in practice that means, if something was looted
after 1970 it could no longer be legally imported
into the United States but if it was before 1970
even though it was excavated illegally, it could be
and that gave the owner a kind of legal protection
So nowadays when objects are available
for sale on the art market
the desirable thing is for them to have a paper trail
that shows that they left their country of origin prior to 1970
The story of the looting eventually came out
and we have now the bases
at the complex from which this likely came
We actually know a lot about the sebasteion in the city of Bubon
because the statue bases are still there
So of course now the question is
to try to match up all of these beautiful bronze
statues in museums and private collections around North America
with the statue bases that are still in situ in Turkey
because those have inscriptions on them and would identify the figures
Perhaps not surprisingly
museums and private collectors have been reluctant
to allow this kind of testing to take place
for example, to create plaster castes
of the feet of their statues to then go see if those match
the bases in Turkey.
They've been reluctant to do that because
They'd rather not know that their statue has been illegally removed
because that would build evidence that could support
the case to return the sculptures to Turkey
In fact, we can even say that there's a kind of tension
between ownership interests
and historical knowledge
So, for example, the label at the Metropolitan
leaves open a huge amount of uncertainty
This statue is described as being Greek or Roman
Hellenistic or Imperial
2nd Century BC all the way up to 2nd Century AD
So they're saying "We have no idea where in a 400 year
time span
this statue actually dates to.
But, if we know that it's from this Temple to the Imperial Cult
in southwest Turkey
and that it was part of a large group, there were 20 other statues there
All from the mid-2nd Century depicting emperors of the Antonine Dynasty
that would give us a lot of information about
why these were produced, whose interests they served
what they represented, how they would have been
perceived by audience members
And so, the process of art history
the process of archaeology, is a function
of the interaction between the museum, the collector
looters, and the public