WORCESTER, Mass: A bronze bust believed to depict the daughter of an ancient Roman emperor has been seized from an art museum in Massachusetts by New York authorities investigating antiquities stolen from Turkey.
The discovery is the most recent in a long-running investigation into a network of smugglers who moved items stolen from Bubon in southwest Turkey through Manhattan. A spokesperson for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg did not provide further details of the investigation.
The Worcester Art Museum, which is located about 40 miles west of Boston, purchased the bust known as “Portrait of a Lady” in 1966. The confiscation comes weeks after the Manhattan district attorney’s office removed a monument from a Cleveland museum that was allegedly a statue of the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius.
Worcester Art Museum officials said in a statement that the bust taken from their possession dates from A.D. 160 to 180 and that it is believed to be a life-sized portrayal of a daughter of Marcus Aurelius or another Roman emperor, Septimius Severus.
Museum officials said they had “limited information” about the bust’s history when they acquired it nearly six decades ago.
The bust shows a young woman with a heavy-lidded gaze and hair carefully combed into waves.
Marcus Aurelius ruled as Roman emperor from A.D. 161 to 180 and was a Stoic philosopher whose “Meditations” have been studied over the centuries. Septimius Severus’ reign from A.D. 193 to 211 was marked by his efforts to convert the government into a military monarchy.
Turkey first made claims about the Marcus Aurelius statue in 2012 when it released a list of nearly two dozen objects in the Cleveland museum’s collection that it said had been looted from Bubon and other locations. Museum officials said at the time that Turkey had provided no hard evidence of looting.
