The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (DA) announcement yesterday, March 22, that it returned 12 looted antiquities to Turkey. Some of these items were housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which came under scrutiny this week after a report showed that more than 1,000 objects from his collection once belonged to people who have been accused or convicted of crimes against antiquities.
Three of the recently repatriated items were recovered during ongoing investigations tracing looted antiquities from two looted archaeological sites in Turkey — Perge and Bubo. Turkish villagers found this last site – an unexcavated ancient Roman site – in 1967. Before Turkish authorities arrived, however, two brothers looted the antiquities, sold them to a dealer, and soon after, Bubo objects arrived in the collection of American coin dealer Charles Lipson.
As scholar Elizabeth Marlowe noted in a 2022 Hyperallergic opinion piece, The Met was in possession of two antiquities linked to the illegally looted site of Bubo: a bronze representation of Emperor Caracalla (c. 211-217 CE) and a bronze statue of an unnamed man, a vague description which Marlowe interprets as an intentional obfuscation of the sculpture’s dubious origins.
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibits two pieces associated with Bubo, but avoids linking them together lest it raise questions about their respective journeys to the museum,” Marlowe wrote.
“In this label, the museum not only pretends to know far less than it actually does, but deliberately misleads the public,” she concludes later in the article. “This exhibit at our nation’s most esteemed museum is, in fact, a laundering operation.”
The bronze statue, determined by the DA to be a depiction of Emperor Septimius Severus in 225 CE, was part of Lipson’s collection and eventually found its way into the Met through a loan in 2011, after a visit to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He was seized by the DA in February. The Met did not respond to Hyperallergic immediate request for comment.
The nine other repatriated works were recovered from the Met’s trustee Shelby Whitewhose antiquities collection was the subject of a criminal investigation that resulted in the seizure of 89 items valued at $69 million.
“This sends a clear and strong message to all smugglers, dealers and collectors that the illegal purchase, possession and sale of cultural objects will have consequences,” Turkish Consul General Reyhan Özgür said at the ceremony. repatriation on March 22. According to Özgür, the country has recovered 1,203 objects since 2022, but earlier this month a New York court ruled that Turkey cannot recover the 6,000-year-old ‘Guennol Stargazer’ because it too long to ask for his return.
