Portrait Head of Caracalla

Portrait Head of Caracalla

The Manhattan DA seized this bronze portrait of the Roman emperor Caracalla from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in May 2023 as part of a sweeping investigation of the looting of the ancient site of Bubon, Türkiye.

In May 1967, Turkish authorities learned that local looters had illegally excavated several life-sized bronze statues near the village of İbecik, in southwest Türkiye. Archaeologists from the nearby Burdur museum conducted an emergency excavation and discovered the remains of a Sebasteion, a temple complex dedicated to the imperial cult, which worshipped Roman emperors as gods. By the time authorities arrived, the bronze statues were missing, but the marble bases with the names of 14 Roman emperors and empresses were left behind. Villagers told Turkish archaeologist Jale Inan they had sold nine or ten bronzes to a dealer for as much as 90,000 Turkish lira each, as well as many fragments, including heads, arms, and legs.

Among them was this portrait bust, cast in the Severan style, circa 212-217 CE. Here, Carcalla is depicted as an adult, during his brief six-year reign, before he was killed in combat with the Parthians in north Mesopotamia.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the portrait bust as a gift from the Norbert Schimmel Trust in 1989. Schimmel, a long-time trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was a wide-ranging collector since the 1940s who acquired and donated "without fanfare" and donated his 300-piece collection of Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, Roman and Etruscan antiquities to the Met before his death from pneumonia in 1990. His wealth came in large part from founding the New Hermes Engraving Machine Corporation in New York, the world's largest manufacturer of portable engraving machines, which was sold in 1981. From at least 1960, he helped fund archaeological projects, libraries, student charities, and was well known in elite social circles.

Most statues and sculptures illicitly removed from Bubon in the 1960s were acquired by American antiquities trafficker Robert Hecht, who likely sold this portrait to Norbert Schimmel. The 1992 Bulletin published by the Metropolitan Museum suggests that this item had been loaned to other museums before 1989, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1974 and the Kapitolinischen Museen in Rom (Capitoline Museum in Rome) in the early 1980s. From 1989 until 2023, it remained in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection until its seizure by law enforcement under a search warrant authorized by the State Supreme Court of New York.

1

Sculpture – statues, carvings, bronzes, reliefs, figurines

Roman

Norbert Schimmel

Metropolitan Museum of Art

1989.281.80

Türkiye

Ancient Art: Gifts from the Norbert Schimmel Collection https://cdn.sanity.io/files/cctd4ker/production/c6bcf6fd6cc33545fce239a6f16d216802d88c2c.pdf

Jason Felch

Damien Huffer

Michela Herbert